Which they had known about all along. But instead of admitting error, Jobs and crew tried blaming Motorola. After Motorola bailed Apple out of a very deep hole by delivering the G4 chips earlier than scheduled. I hate vaporware. I cannot fathom why any manufacturer would conceive of deliberate ly announcing a product they cannot deliver.
Back orders are overhead, shipments are profit.
I've gone round and round with manufacturers to the point they eventually get tired of listening to me. Vaporware creates nothing but headaches and aggravation. Not least of all, when you deliberately announce a product that you can't ship, all sorts of nasty things can happen between the order and the delivery. Like earthquakes in Taiwan which cause the price of memory to rocket. Apple took 86,000 orders for G4 machines they could not deliver because they weren't scheduled to get the chips yet from Motorola.