Remember, kiddies, the important thing to remember amid all this PowerBook G5 hubbub is not to panic. Losing your cool and plunging five stories off a nearby rooftop won't get you a portable G5 any faster, unless of course there are G5 PowerBooks in the afterlife, which is a possibility we haven't yet ruled out completely, but which we still classify as highly unlikely at best. Barring that, the whole jumping-off-the-roof-in-despair thing is unlikely to improve the situation unless you somehow manage to land on and crush the secret mastermind behind the Global Covert Anti-Portable G5 Conspiracy, and the odds of pulling that off are probably pretty slim, too. So just mellow out.

For those of you who aren't freaking out right now because you have no earthly idea what we're talking about, it seems that a lot of people are really worked up because, after Apple refreshed its PowerBook lineup with still more G4-based units, the company's veep of hardware product marketing-- you remember, the Joz-- went gabbing to the BBC, apparently with the aim of stamping out any last remaining glimmer of hope that a PowerBook G5 might actually ship before New Year's. You may recall how upset people got last June when Joz remarked that the G5 "is not going in a Powerbook anytime soon," and how things didn't get much better when Steve Jobs himself mentioned last September that "we'd like to have it by the end of next year."

Now, while those were apparently just off-the-cuff remarks made to the media, people have a way of mentally etching this stuff in stone, so when Steve said "end of next year," lots of Mac fans immediately drew big, red circles on their calendars, figuring December 31st, 2004 for the drop-dead last-chance delivery date and hoping for something earlier. Unfortunately, as of just a couple of days ago, the Joz hasn't changed his tune from ten months earlier: "In the very long run, the G5 is part of our long term processor roadmap, but it will be some time before that processor will be in a notebook." So in ten months we've gone from "not anytime soon" to "in the very long run." Now that's progress, people!

Worse yet, Joz "pointed out that it had taken at least two years for the G4 chip to make it from the desktop to the notebook," and if he's implying what we think he's implying, well, yeah, we suppose we can understand the impulse among some Mac fans to fling themselves bodily off a tall structure. Is it really possible that the PowerBook G5 could still be over a year from shipping? Can it truly be that difficult to stuff a G5 into a laptop case? (Give us ten minutes with a shoehorn and a stout pair of needle-nose pliers and we bet we could pull it off.) And more to the point, does Apple honestly think it stands a whelk's chance in a supernova of sustaining sales of G4-based PowerBooks for another twelve or fourteen months?

Well, not that we have the faintest inkling what Apple is really thinking, but if we had to guess, we'd say "no," "no," and "no." Maybe we're just interminably chipper people that normal people eventually want to silence with a brick, but we have to side with the Mac OS Rumors perspective, which is that the Joz was probably trying to "alleviate serious sales problems with the Powerbook G4." It's only common sense, after all; we're not exactly business-savvy people, but we strongly suspect that one of the Ten Business Commandments or whatever is something like "Thou shalt not ship five new PowerBook G4s and then tell people, 'oh, yeah, these are good and all, but wait'll you see the G5s we'll be shipping four months from now! Those will blow your socks off!'" Simply put, Apple has nothing to gain by building hopes of a PowerBook G5 shipping anytime before Episode III.

That said, MOSR doesn't think it's all just a "buy these now" ploy, as the site is now "beginning to lean towards believing that PowerBook G5s won't ship until 2005." Personally, we've sort of given up wondering anymore, largely because by the time a G5 PowerBook does see the light of day, it'll be another three months before it actually ships and at least a year before we could ever possibly afford one. We're not entirely sure why that fact makes us less likely to do the concrete swan dive instead of more so, but hey, we take the extra survival instinct wherever we can get it.