Owners of Apple Power Mac G3s can't upgrade to Motorola's new G4 chip.

Third-party hardware manufacturers say the G3's dead-end upgrade path is deliberate.

A spokesman for XLR8, which makes Macintosh upgrade cards, said Apple disabled the machines to prevent upgrade manufacturers from offering G4-based daughtercards to Mac users. The company maintains that Apple could correct the problem at any time with a new firmware release.

XLR8 engineers are preparing a workaround and hope to release a G4 upgrade card for the disabled G3 machines within 60 days.

The full story appears at

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