I made two really dumb mistakes that I really regret because I think they would have made a difference to Apple. One was when we are at the end of the life of the Motorola processor… we took two of our best technologists and put them on a team to go look and recommend what we ought to do. They came back and they said it doesn’t make any difference which RISC architecture you pick, just pick the one that you think you can get the best business deal with. But don’t use CISC. CISC is complex instructions set. RISC is reduced instruction set. So Intel lobbied heavily to get us to stay with them… (but) we went with IBM and Motorola with the PowerPC. And that was a terrible decision in hindsight. If we could have worked with Intel, we would have gotten onto a more commoditized component platform for Apple, which would have made a huge difference for Apple during the 1990s. In the 1990s, the processors were getting powerful enough that you could run all of your technology and software, and that’s when Microsoft took off with their Windows 3.1. Prior to that you had to do it in software and hardware, the way Apple did. When the processors became powerful enough, it just became a commodity and the software can handle all those subroutines we had to do in hardware. So we totally missed the boat. Intel would spend 11 billion dollars and evolve the Intel processor to do graphics… and it was a terrible technical decision. I wasn’t technically qualified, unfortunately, so I went along with the recommendation. The other even bigger failure on my part was if I had thought about it better I should have gone back to Steve.

Urspünglich wollte Apple Anfang der neunziger Jahre zusammen mit Motorola und IBM einen echten Konkurrenten zu der x86-Prozessor-Familie von Intel entwickeln, doch Intel konnte sich im Duo mit Microsoft am Markt viel besser behaupten und viel mehr Geld in die Forschung und Entwicklung stecken. Motorola fokussierte sich auf die Produktion von Mobiltelefonen, während IBM die PowerPC-Prozessoren nicht mehr in für Apple optimierten Ausführungen weiterentwickelte. Bis zur Betriebssystems-Version MacOS 9.x war aber Apple an die PowerPC-Architektur gebunden. Der Befreiungsschlag konnte erst mit der Übernahme von NeXT und dem dazugehörigen Betriebssystem NeXTStep erfolgen. NeXTStep war die Grundlage für MacOS X und wurde von Anfang an auch auf Intel-Chips entwickelt. Im Jahr 2005 kündigte Apple-Chef Steve Jobs an, die gesamte Modellreihe auf Intel-Prozessoren umzustellen. Am 10. Januar 2006 wurden der erste Intel-iMac sowie die ebenfalls Intel-basierte Laptopreihe MacBook/MacBook Pro vorgestellt. Noch im selben Jahr wurden auch die Workstations (MacPro) und Server (Xserve) auf Intel-Prozessoren umgestellt.