1) PowerPC is pretty alive and well. The Xbox 360, Nintendo Wii (U), and Playstation 3 all use PowerPC chips. There are a lot of these. IBM's Linux/AIX servers are all PowerPC and IBM incidentally makes the chips for the above game consoles as well. Not to mention the number of PowerPC chips in cars and other embedded devices dwarfs all the above in units sold.
2) Intel (probably) got out of the Xscale game not just because of hubris, but because it was necessarily enriching its competitor through licensing fees of the ARM architecture. Unless Intel could buy ARM, which it couldn't due to anti-trust, it should probably seek out a home grown solution instead of sealing its fate as another fab for ARM's designs. I'm not sure Intel didn't see the writing on the wall, it just failed to execute on a solution. Intel was probably very wary of trying to make a new architecture after the failure of the Itanium so it concentrated its efforts on a low powered x86 aka Atom. Unfortunately this was and still is a colossal failure. Intel still has no products for low powered devices and the arguments for an x86 solution are starting to fall apart fast.
3) Apple's success is a culmination of Steve Job's vision and Tim Cook's operational mastery. Apple's products before Tim Cook were beautifully designed, over priced, and under performing. Apple's product line without Steve Jobs was boring and unappealing. These last few years have been a golden age for Apple. To expect things to only get better from here would be to place all the emphasis on the company and ignore people inside it, not to mention history. I expect Tim Cook to keep Apple in a very competitive place while he's around, but companies have a tendency to lose their way. Just ask HP.
I'm guessing the licensing fees are peanuts to Intel and probably come with patent indemnification.
Note that an ARM license has both an up front fee and a per unit royalty. Without Xscale, Intel's royalty fees would be zero meaning as you say it is free to maintain going forward. I can only guess why the license didn't go with Xscale, but I see Marvell is only listed as an ARM9 license holder so maybe it just didn't want the ARM7 and ARM11 licenses.
Perhaps, too, there are other complications that come with transferring an ARM license in the contract language or patent arrangements.
I'm not trying to be a pissant, I just haven't heard such an opinion before.
I think one of the big reasons behind Apple pulling out of PowerPC was that Intel were developing for the personal computer (and commodity server) aspects of cpu chip use and reacting to the requirements of that market, where Motorola were much more beholden to companies like Ford and Toyota and Hyundai, who wanted long-production-life products for 10year lifespan fuel injection or antilock brake systems. Apple couldn't swing power over the future development roadmap for PowerPC at Motorola in the same way that HP/Compaq/Dell managed with Intel.
For me they always performed well and the reduced need for maintenance saved me a lot of time (which might equal to money for some people).
The last few years of the PPC era saw macs that were significantly slower than their intel/amd counterparts.
This is subjectively correct. The G4 and G5 had Altivec coprocessing units which were the precursors to SIMD and GPGPU. A few apps could take advantage of it to do video processing and vector calculations but most cross platform apps(like Office or Photoshop) just didn't use it at all, putting the G5 at a severe disadvantage. Also, Intel was, sort of, cheating with their NetBurst architecture. Deeper and deeper pipelines allowed them to get higher clock speeds without adding much actual performance. Ops just sat in the queue longer, but their predictive caching algorithm was very advanced (I'll give them that). Once they got as far as they could go, clock wise, with the P4 they simply started packing more processors on the die (core duo). In fact, their saving grace came from their competitor AMD with the x86_64 extension set.
PPC had the ability to go much faster (as seen in the 3GHz X360, PS3) they just couldn't get the die smaller nor the power down. IBM had the performance advantage with their Power7 CPUs but weren't really interested in the consumer CPU market and left Apple holding the bag. Apple wanted smaller, low power CPUs for their laptops and found it in Intel. Windows compatibility (at least through VM) was icing on the cake.
NetBurst was not 'cheating' by using a long pipeline to get higher clock speeds. NetBurst was purposely designed to get higher clock speeds therefore better performance. Intel thought it would get to 4 ghz, 5 ghz, 6 ghz, and beyond on NetBurst which would theoretically be better than what we have today if it had worked. Obviously it didn't.
The Core Duo was not based on NetBurst (i.e. Pentium 4). It was based on the Pentium M which was an improved Pentium 3. The Core Duo and everything that came after it are based on the old P6 architecture that started with the Pentium Pro.
Intel's saving grace was going back to the P6 and abandoning NetBurst. Intel had adopted x86_64 on NetBurst and it was worthless.
PowerPC can get smaller dies and lower power consumption just fine. In fact most PowerPC chips today are smaller and lower power than the G4 ever was. Motorola makes them all day long for automaters, defense contractors, and network device makers. The problem was Motorola's other customers didn't care about performance. Nobody wanted to run Photoshop on guided missiles.
The PPC 970 (i.e. G5) was powerful, but IBM made CPUs for big iron. When a CPU ran hotter than expected it was the mechanical engineer's problem to fix in the enclosure. IBM just didn't need to figure out how to make chips with tight operational constraints. IBM didn't have the expertise to get the PPC 970 to work in a Power Book and IBM didn't have any incentive moving forward to build that expertise.
It just so happened that Intel was in the middle of its NetBurst epiphany. NetBurst was bad. Centrino was great. The Core Duo was the future. Now Intel was talking Apple's language.
PS. IBM's POWER7 just came out in 2010. The PPC 970 that Apple called the G5 was a low power version of the POWER4.
As a owner of G3 and G4 machines, I can tell you that they were underperfoming. 7450 was slower than equivalent Pentium M (that's what was in PowerBooks and windows laptops at the time). Going back further, 466 MHz G3 couldn't keep decoding divx movie at SD resolution. 400 MHz P2 or 433 MHz celeron had no problems.
Once the PC became primarily a web browsing platform, the OS didn't really matter anymore - this was Apple's big opportunity, and the release of Mac OS X took advantage of it. It took few years after that for the momentum to shift, and this was certainly helped by the success of the iPod which built Apple's reputation as a company that could deliver quality products.
In terms of breaking Microsoft's stranglehold on the PC business, it was definitely the web wot dun it. Of course Microsoft saw this coming - in the end though, they just couldn't fight it.
Not quite true. MS went pretty deep in Itanium. The platform didn't sell and they eventually gave up, but they committed a fair bit to it.
MS has also long supported ARM with Windows CE. And there was a project called LongARM where MS ported Vista(?) to ARM. Also recall MS did SPOT watches and robotics among other random things. And in their biggest non-x86 move they did XBox360 using IBM processors.
And now Microsoft, once an unstoppable juggernaut, just doesn't get it when Ballmer describes tablets as "just another form factor". They failed for 10 years to make tablets just another way to sell more Windows licenses. They're still kicking that dead horse with Windows 8.
I think its a mistake to say that a "strategy" that failed 10 years ago won't work now. Apple's strategy of building the full HW/SW stack also failed in the past, but its working now. Timing and execution are both important. More than Android, I think Windows8 will be the big iPad tablet competitor.
My probability of that happening in the consumer space is fairly low unless Windows8 comes to be able to run snappily on tablets whose exterior does not get hot to the touch. (The exterior of the iPad never gets hot to the touch.) And my probability that MS (and Intel) will achieve that is fairly low because my probability is fairly low that MS and Intel (considered a single entity cooperating to expand into the consumer tablet market) will come to understand and take the "heat factor" sufficiently seriously.
But IMHO even if Windows8 tablets (as I expect) will get hot to the touch, Windows8 tablets will probably eventually succeed in mostly expelling the iPad from the enterprise (because employees have much less freedom to choose their hardware than consumers do and will tend much more strongly to put up with hot external surfaces).
And he's right about the keyboard. Personally I'm screwed because I use dvorak - I'll never have a decent UK map (except on Linux). On the bright side, having the wrong symbols on them makes the keys in question blend in with all the others.
It's true that most people don't use (or even know) Windows Phone 7, but I have talked with several that do and they are really happy with that system. Judging only subjectively - and only from reactions from others - Microsoft maybe "got it" with mobiles this time.
Ironically, the story began with a note on how Apple puts the UK consumer last.
In the 80s, Apple was dominant in the GUI space. Windows 3.1 put a huge dent in this. By the time Windows 95 came out, Apple was essentially dead.
During all this, Intel and Microsoft had an uneasy marriage of convenience. They were dependent on each other but had clear lines of separation between hardware and software.
Microsoft tried to branch out. The original versions of NT ran on other architectures, like Alpha and MIPS. Under Steve Jobs (many may remember that Steve Jobs was only interim CEO for years after the NeXT purchase while the Apple board searched for a replacement for Gil Amelio).
5+ years ago, with a resurgent Apple in the PC space, Apple abandoned Motorla for Intel, killing the PowerPC in all but name. Microsoft had long since abandoned all the non-x86 architectures.
Intel was so dominant that they sold their low-power chip division (XScale) and seemed to have an answer for low cost computer devices in the form of the Atom as the netbook market just exploded.
Intel basically discounted any device smaller than this. So did Microsoft. Apple completely transformed the mobile space with the iPhone and then the iPad, catapulting ARM from a niche embedded product to something eating away at Intel from the bottom end, potentially threatening their entire business.
In the 90s the churn of forced obsolescence made MS and Intel a lot of money and solved a lot of problems. There were no old versions of Windows to support as the market for PCs was growing at a huge rate and hardware just didn't last that long.
Now the CPU power that the average user needs has plateaued. Any PC made in the last 5 years (maybe longer) will be fine for most people. The trend now is towards lower power and more mobility, which is why ARM is a strategic threat to Intel.
It's incredibly funny ("the ironing is delicious" as Bart would say) that Apple is now one of Intel's biggest customers while being the driver to the threat to Intel.
And now Microsoft, once an unstoppable juggernaut, just doesn't get it when Ballmer describes tablets as "just another form factor". They failed for 10 years to make tablets just another way to sell more Windows licenses. They're still kicking that dead horse with Windows 8.
All the while Apple is making money hand over fist and HP, Dell, etc are struggling to make a buck or, in HP's case, getting out of the PC business entirely.
All of these companies try to imitate Apple releasing vaguely copycat products but none of them get it. They're engaged in what I call "shotgun marketing" as they have no idea what the market wants and just fire off a shotgun blast, hoping something will stick.
Only Apple seems willing or able to put the consumer first. The Apple-haters will I'm sure violently disagree with some or all of this.
Microsoft I believe will continue a very long but now inevitable slide into irrelevance (companies that large take many years to die). The jury is still out on Intel.
The only companies that seem to have a long future ahead of them are Apple, Google and maybe Facebook.