Rumor: Jobs, Motorola Still at War: G4 a "Tonka Truck"


Steve Jobs' flair for colorful language reached its peak in discussions at Motorola's HQ recently, a report at MacBidouille claims.

Jobs allegedly characterized the G4 as a "Tonka Truck", a "toy" compared to the G5.

There also appears to be some uncertainty regarding the availability of the portable G4 processors, the 7457. Revamped iMacs, released yesterday, retain the lower-octane 7455s, which have likely been clocked to achieve their 1.25GHz.

Jobs is also reportedly concerned that sufficient supply of the 7457s will be on stream for the PowerBook G4s, and that Apple is gun-shy about making a PB announcement until it is sure it can deliver product to customers on time. Depending on how quickly a portable version of the G5 can be produced, Apple is expecting to rely upon the 7457s into 2004 at least.

Analysis: The language sounds like authentic Jobs. Buttoned-down Moto execs must dread meetings with him. More seriously, Apple needs these revamped PBs for the Apple Expo Paris keynote, and the 7455s, apparently, won't do. Moreover, IBM's yields of the G5s vastly exceed those of Moto's 7457s, it's been rumored previously.

Motorola's 7457 consumes less than 10w at 1GHz, doubles the 7455's on-chip cache from 256k to 512k, and supports up to 2MB of backside L3 cache.