Apple says goodbye to single processor PowerPC Power Macs

After seeing ship times slip to 7 to 10 business days earlier this week, all mention of the 1.8GHz Power Mac G5 vanished from the company's online store by Wednesday morning.

According to reliable sources of information, the company actually declared an "end-of-life" to the 1.8GHz Power Mac in late April when it revamped its Power Mac G5 offerings to include dual processors ranging from 2.0 to 2.7GHz.

Over the last month and a half it's believed that Apple manufactured very few, if any, single processor Power Mac systems and instead moved product that was already present in its inventory.

The Power Mac product line has been a sore spot in Apple's product family as of late, largely in part to IBM's inability to produce G5 processors that meet or surpass the 3GHz barrier.

It's believed that during the last fiscal quarter Apple shipped about 130,000 Power Mac G5 units when Xserve numbers were deducted from the company's reported Power Mac mix — a far cry from the 211,000 Power Mac systems the company shipped in the same quarter of 2002.

Going forward, it seems unlikely that Apple will re-introduce a single processor PowerPC-based Power Mac system with the consumer-oriented iMac line already topping out at 2GHz itself. And in a year and a half Power Macs are due to obtain a flavor of Intel's Pentium processor.

So today the single processor PowerPC Power Mac appears to be nothing more than a memory and collectors item for the ages.