Apple is suffering from slow progress on speedier processors from IBM, though the company is the right partner for the job, Alex Salkever opines in his latest Byte of the Apple for Business Week Online. IBM is struggling to produce cutting-edge G5 chips of sufficient quality in sufficient quantity, “and the upper half of Apple’s hardware lineup is in limbo,” a situation that Apple has faced in the past waiting for speedier G4 chips from Motorola, Salkever writes. Despite this, IBM makes a great partner for Apple because the company has a “hard-won reputation for bleeding-edge research in chip fabrication.”