Ah, the rose-fingered dawn tickles the long-suffering chin of the Mac faithful once again with the temptation of newer, faster, Intel-stomping chips. Ah, cruel Sirens! Having navigated the wrath of Poseidon, been lured into eating the Lotus of RISC, been imprisoned by the Cyclops of Motorola and incarcerated by Calypso on her island of Altivec, finally the seas are now clear to return to beloved Ithaca, where all Macs run faster, all UI quirks subside and where the True Love of Penelope will make the databuses sing!

Yes, IBM is riding to the rescue, to liberate us from the perfidious clutches of Motorola! The POWER architecture is coming to a desktop near you, with 64-bit yummyness oozing from every pin. If you are patient, that is. According to the eWeek report, this is still a year off, and that means it's going to be 2004 before we see these chips in actual shipping Macs. By that time, the Intel and AMD chips will have progressed in speed too, with perhaps some version of Itanium even producing decent performance.

The ravenous reception this news has garnered in the Mac world is understandable. We've been in a funk over performance. The G4 has been a disappointment, right from the start when Apple had to reduce the shipping speeds of Macs because of production problems. And ever since then, speed bumps in the G4 have been few and far between, with the fastest Macs now shipping with dual 1.25 GHz processors. Yes, I know. In Photoshop filters, the G4 is pretty damn good. But for other things, the limited bus bandwidth and the slow clock do hurt performance. An argument can be made that a more efficient ISA can make up for slower clock speeds, but there comes a point where the argument becomes stretched, and then breaks. We are at such a point (or have passed it), and Macs desperately need a serious speed boost. Perhaps the oft-rumored G5 will make its debut at MacWorld in January. I'm not holding my breath.

We've been in this kind of position before, when Motorola's 68k-line was falling behind. The switch to PowerPC did help the Mac keep rough parity with the Intel world for a while, and even allowed Apple to ship the fastest laptops in the world. I will grant that the current crop of machines is fast enough for most people, but that is not the point. People do want "value for money," and if that means getting more gigahertzes per dollar, they'll go for it. Design alone won't be able to sell; Apple can get away with lagging a little, but the divergence has become too large now. And this is also reflected in the response these rumors have been getting in the Mac world, which has greeted the purported news with a massive exhalation of relief, yearning for the salvation of this latest deus-ex-machina.

I'm still reasonably happy with my G4/400, and I'm not looking to get a new Mac just yet. However, if the current state of affairs does not improve, I may become tempted to look for options elsewhere.