Originally posted by Zeke
Actually, economically this makes sense. Generally companies do R&D on tons of stuff (even making prototypes) which never go into production....So Moto probably did have the chips but either they were having problems with yields or more likely they just decided the market wasn't big enough to justify the massive amount of money a facility would require for nice processors. $$
In order to have yield problems, Motorola would actually have to have the production lines up and running (as they would need if they were sampling the chip). And that would imply a big investment that they could not recoup simply by canceling the chip. So I am still very skeptical that this would make good business sense...there is a big difference between building a prototype versus actually sampling a chip and sending batches of them off to prospective customers (like Apple).
But really, that is neither here nor there, because, again, there were NO credible reports that the G5 ever existed in the form you are referring to (e.g. an ultra-high performance processor near production). If you know of any, then please provide the URL. Otherwise, my statement stands. Virtually all of the reports about the G5 and its breathtaking performance (easily exceeding that of a 4 Ghz Pentium 4, according to the reports) back in late 2001 came either from The Register or other articles quoting the The Register (the only "independent" source I ever saw that also said there might be a new processor coming was, ironically, Architosh). In retrospect, those articles were obsviously a hoax - presumably The Register was sincere in its reporting, but apparently they did not or could not verify the credibility of their "sources" (who were clearly misleading them). Why do we know this? Because the articles explicilty stated that Motorola was already G5 processors in quantity for Apple, and the Apple production lines were supposedly churning out new PowerMac G5 towers only weeks before MWSF 2002. If Apple already had so many of these magnificent processors available and was producing new towers, there is NO WAY that they would have canceled this machine. They might have delayed it, if there were some technical glitches, but they would never have canceled it. So the rumors were clearly false. There is no doubt of that, so don't kid yourself otherwise. Somebody had their fun, and whoever it was misled a large portion of the (admittedly gullible) Mac rumors community. And hey, I'll be the first to admit that even I believed the rumors might be true at one point in time. But in retrospect they were CLEARLY FALSE. Once again, THERE IS NO DOUBT about this. Oh, did I mention yet that the rumors were false? Because I wanted to be totally clear about that.
Now, is it possible that there was SOME OTHER (real) Motorola G5 that we NEVER heard anything about and that was entering production yet suddenly got canceled? Conceivably, that could be true. But since, again, we have NEVER heard any rumors about this chip, there is absolutely no reason why we would think that it would exist, especially since it would make no economic sense.
Hopefully the wait won't be like the PowerBook! 
