Pecking Order

With the release of the G5, there was finally hope for a real up-to-date CPU for the iMac, but the problem was when that would become a reality. After following Apple closely for a while, you become very aware of their product pecking order: PowerMacs, PowerBooks, iMacs/eMacs, and iBooks. This was a policy of product feature positioning, and basically a lower Mac could not get faster or better than any higher Mac. This meant that even a desktop (iMac) had to wait until they got the feature in a laptop (PowerBook) first. This arrangement runs in to problems easily. When Motorola couldn't increase the top speed of the G4, it created a product log jam since the lower machines couldn't get very close to the top end machines in clock speed. Once the G5 was released, this created some breathing room again, so when Moto finally produced better G4 chips after feeling the heat from IBM, the logs could move again.

The current situation is back in log jam mode again since IBM was having yield problems, causing the G5s to not increase in speed on schedule. If PowerMacs have no faster G5s, then PowerBooks have no slower G5s to move up to, etc. And certainly, according to history, the iMac will see no G5 before a PowerBook will, which could take quite some time given the G5's heat production characteristics. However, recent developments seem to indicate a change in policy. The iBooks and eMacs were updated with better G4 chips than the iMac has. Only the eMac has equivalent speed, but the new G4 chips have twice the level 2 cache memory, putting the eMac notably above the best iMac in performance. It would not be unprecedented for this to happen with an upgraded iMac coming a few weeks after, but it's been several weeks. If they were going to just do a G4 upgrade for the iMac, it would have been easy and out already. Unless there was some technical issue with a G4 iMac update, this points to them getting a G5 iMac ready as the next iMac update. However, there's no way that it'll come until the G5 PowerMacs get their update, but that should be very soon.

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