iBook G5?

heh heh heh heh...

Let's put it this way...the ability to put a G5 into a laptop (powerbook, iBook, whatever) with the same small form factor and tolerable fan noise levels has eluded Apple's engineers for at least 2 years. It's not happening.

That said, I'm typing this on my new iBook G4, and it's much better than my previous iBook G3. I'd go for it.

The G5 chips are too hot to put into iBooks so the answer is no. iBooks with intel processors should be coming out next year, but no G5's. I am buying my own iBook G4 around Christmas too, one of the new 12 in 1.33 Ghz iBooks. I reccommend you do the same. In conclusion: you should buy the newest model G4, they are not slow and should be perfect for your needs unless you use intensive applications. If you are just surfing the web, word processing and using iTunes etc.., buy the newest iBook G4.

Put it this way, there will be newer PowerBooks and iBooks comming out every year....

well, we don't know the specs, of course. They are rumored to be coming out ahead of schedule, perhaps around April or even earlier. However, while I'm sure Steve and his engineers will roll out the stops for its release, I have some caveats:

* avoid ever buying a first-generation laptop---much more likely to have unforseen glitches
* Most software will initially be either be PPC-only (not yet compiled to run on x86 processors) or else be a dual-binary that could run on both. PPC-only apps (which is what you have now) will run on Intel, but only under emulation. I've heard different things as to the speeds of applications under Rosetta, the emulator to be used by Apple to translate PPC code to x86 instructions. But I can say that any emulation has to be slower by definition than native code. So you may or may not see a performance hit compared with today's iBook G4 (if the intel system is a 5 GHz chip, then performance may not be bad at all 8-) )

As we all know, speculation of future Apple products are not allowed on this board. So might I suggest you try-
http://www.macrumors.com/ or http://www.thinksecret.com/
or http://www.appleinsider.com/