Why not when?
One month ago I sold my dear G4/933 to buy a dual G5, but my honest reseller (luckily here we don't have Apple Stores here) told me: "it's better to wait, the new models should be out by the end of march" ... and my long waiting started
, reading every day all of the Mac rumors sites.
I don't believe the 970FX cooling issue is true because Apple already started shipping the Xserve G5, with the same CPU in a much smaller case, and the now contradicted graphic card delay sounds odd to me, considering that Apple (and eventually ATI) had more than 9 months to decide which card they should mount on the G5 revB and to produce many pieces of them.
Today I checked the PM G5 avalaibility for the two Apple distributors here in Italy and each of them still has about 40 1.6 GHz, 120 dual 1.8 and 80 dual 2.0, with some few dozens still to come. At the actual selling rate they should last about 2-3 weeks.
My thought is that Apple is simply waiting to empty its stock while making more money now than before by selling us (or at least
trying to sell) the revA G5 at the same price they sold it 9 months ago; if the new models should be announced now the old ones shall have a significant price rebate, with a consequent money loss for Apple. Probably they are also assembling plenty of revB G5s just now, to be able to ship them as soon as they are announced avoiding the usual and hated "shipping in 4-6-8-10 weeks".
I also think that they can't directly jump from the actual 2 GHz to 3 GHz because of at least the following matters:
- they never did such a speed bump before, probably because a similar thing could arise many technical problems
- the Xserve just started shipping with a 2 GHz clock, hence they can't sell a "desktop" that is almost 50% faster than the top server
- it would not be correct at all for the customers to sell a 3.0 GHz model at the same price a 2.0 GHz had few days before (but maybe Apple doesn't take much care of what is correct for its customers
)
Moreover, they can't mount on all of the revB models a dual processor because they need at least a "entry level" G5, and until the iMac G5 is out they will leave the low revB model with a single CPU
Nevertheless Apple usually updates each product line every 6-7 months and the last PM update was almost 10 months ago (except the dual 1.8 on november) hence I think that Apple
must announce in the next weeks some new models will be out (something to extensively test the new 970FX and "prepare" it for the 3.0 GHz bump, like single 2.0, dual 2.2, dual 2.4), bigger disks (120-250 GB), more memory (512MB - 1GB) and better graphic cards, but the real bang will be at WWDC, where they could announce the PB G5
"The first 64bit notebook" (while Asus already ships a notebook mounting the AMD's 64 bit chip
) a G5 equipped iMac
"The first 64 bit soccer ball" and the 3.0 GHz PowerMacs
"More bit power", many of them to be shipped on september (after all the summer ends in september, so Jobs could mantain what he promised last year).
C'mon Apple, at least tell us
when the new G5s are to be announced!