You know, the more we think about it, the more convinced we are that Apple's primary reason for finally giving up on PowerPC and hopping into bed with Intel is the continued lack of a portable G5 and the total stagnation of laptop-happy G4s. Even from a purely intra-Apple standpoint, it's getting increasingly difficult to keep the company's pro/consumer desktop/portable product grid consistent. For years, Apple was always careful to keep consumer-grade Macs like the iMac, iBook, and eMac at earlier chip generations and slower clock speeds than professional models like the Power Mac and PowerBook. That strategy finally fell apart when it couldn't wait any longer for IBM to squish a G5 down to PowerBook size and had to ship the iMac G5 and hope that no one noticed the glaring discrepancy: the lowest-end iMac had a 1.6 GHz G5 and cost just $1,299, while the fastest PowerBook at the time was packing a mere 1.5 GHz G4 and would set you back a minimum of $2,499. Sure, there's the portable-vs.-desktop factor, but the bottom line was that a pro Mac had a slower processor than a consumer system that cost half as much. That sort of thing doesn't look good to potential PowerBook customers.

Things only get worse when you bring the rest of the notebook ecosystem into consideration. We don't have much (okay, any-- ain't life grand?) experience with recent Windows laptops, but several of those who do whine to us on a near-constant basis that Apple's fastest PowerBooks, lovely and lickable though they may be, are clearly and visibly slower than comparably-priced Wintel offerings. Don't get us wrong, here; we love our PowerBooks. But we also don't happen to need two metric tons of skull-stripping speed in our portables, and we know there are plenty of video, audio, and design professionals out there who really do wish their PowerBooks-- still the best tools for the job-- had some mobile-Intel-grade guts-level zippiness to them.

Why's this so important, you ask? Well, you may recall that portables have been making up a larger and larger slice of Apple's spicy deep-dish in recent years, and that trend isn't a Mac-only phenomenon; according to an Associated Press article, the research firm Current Analysis claims that, last month, sales of laptops finally overtook sales of desktop computers for the first time ever, snagging 53 percent of the market due to falling prices and because-- this is the important bit, here-- "just a few years ago, the performance of notebooks was nowhere near where it is today." We suspect that laptop performance in the Wintel world is increasing a lot more quickly than for us in PowerBookland, because three years ago the high-end PowerBook packed a G4 at 800 MHz, so in all that time we've only doubled clock speed, which doesn't sound like great shakes to us.

Interestingly, portable sales in Apple's sales mix last quarter didn't come close to overtaking desktops; they scored only 43 percent of the total number of Macs sold. Granted, the introduction of the Mac mini surely skewed things to the desktop side a little, but the portable percentage was only 40 percent the quarter before, so the ratio is increasing regardless. Maybe PowerBook and iBooks did overtake desktop Macs last month and we just don't have the numbers to show it. But if they didn't, you can bet that performance-- or lack thereof-- had a little something to do with it, and if Apple is selling fewer portables percentage-wise than the industry overall (especially when its portables are so freakin' gorgeous), well, that might be the sort of thing that finally pushed Apple to say sayonara to Freescale and Big Blue. Just a guess.

At any rate, given the increasing shift to notebooks in the market, it's obviously more important than ever that Apple keep its portables competitive-- and at the end of the day, backlit keyboards and motion sensors probably aren't going to cut it all on their lonesome. Until the Intel switchover, maybe Apple can spark sales by adding a cupholder and a fold-out corkscrew and fish scaler.