MacCentral has recently interviewed [1] David Moody, Apple's VP of Worldwide product marketing, about the new iBooks release. During the interview, David Moody said we shouldn't expect new PowerBooks to come before Christmas. This confirms that Apple faces, once again, the nightmare of processor related problems.

This time it's not Motorola/Freescale's fault though, as the company has given a timeframe that it is following accurately at the moment. The fact Apple can't update the PowerBook line is due to the impossibility to fit the G5 processor into it and to production problems IBM faced with the G5.

Apple has certainly already decided which processor will be used on the next Powerbooks. According to earlier reports I have posted (see here [2] and here [3]), the next update should still be G4 based but we can guess Apple is still working actively on the integration of the G5 processor to the PowerBooks for a future update that will come sometime in 2005.