Still hopping up and down on one leg in intense anticipation of the PowerBook G5? Well, just because IBM seems to be on track to squeeze things down to 90 nanometers by New Year's doesn't necessarily mean that those rumors of a portable G5 shipping in the first calendar quarter are true, you know. Don't get us wrong: they might be. But if you need to decide whether to keep hopping incessantly or to curl up on the couch with a bag of Fritos for another year or so, we suggest you go by official Apple statements at least as much as by unsubstantiated rumors. But that's just us.

Take, for example, the recent comments to ComputerWorld by Dave Russell, Apple's director of product marketing for all things portable (as noted by MacRumors). When questioned about the timeframe for wedging a G5 into a Mac that qualifies as portable without its own hand-truck, Dave flatly admits that "it's going to be a while. We think the G4 has a very long life in the PowerBook." A very long life for the G4, hmmmm? Live slow, die old, leave an incompetent-looking corpse.

Okay, so that was a little harsh; the G4 is actually a fine chip, it's just that in Motorola's fumbling hands it never lived up to its real potential. And while a PowerBook is certainly a lot more than just its raw speed, lots of buyers might not see it that way; Apple's portables are getting pummelled mercilessly performance-wise by Centrino laptops over there in Wintel country. And now we've got yet another Apple representative telling the press that the PowerBook isn't likely to see a big leap in processor performance for "a while."

That's right, we said "yet another"; it's easy to block these things out when you get blinded by unconfirmed rumors of dual-processor G5 PowerBooks shipping next Thursday, but ol' Dave is just the most recent of Apple bigwigs to state in no uncertain terms that the G5 is going to be strictly desktop for a fair chunk of time. Back in June, Greg Joswiak said that the G5 is "not going in a PowerBook anytime soon," and Steve Jobs helped quantify that statement slightly in September when he announced that Apple is "working on [the PowerBook G5] and what we'd like is to have it by the end of next year."

They'd like to have it by the end of next year-- and that's from no less an authority than Steve himself. So keep hopping if you must, but it's not likely to make G5 PowerBooks surface any earlier-- say, at January's Expo. Of course, if it does, we'll send you a bundt cake for your trouble.