The Decision: Apple sees greater risk in staying with IBM's chips than in aligning itself with Intel.

Steve Jobs delights in surprising people. Still, it was a shocker, given the long history of Apple's role as the rebellious alternative to Microsoft's and Intel's dominance of personal computing, when he announced in early June that Apple will henceforth develop its Macintosh computers around chips from Intel. By the end of 2007, all of Apple's personal computers will switch from the PowerPC line of processors to Intel's chips, which have powered the dominant PC architecture since 1981.

The PowerPC has served Apple well. In 1991, Apple announced it would move from Motorola's 68000 processor family to what would become the PowerPC, a chip that it would design in collaboration with IBM and Motorola. The decision to switch was made in part because complex-instruction-set computer (CISC) chips like the 68000 and Intel's x86 chips were thought to have run their course, and because Apple wanted to move to a RISC (reduced-instruction-set computer) architecture, which it thought would give it better performance over the long run. For a time, that seemed to be true, though exact performance comparisons between Macs and PCs are difficult to make.