In terms of technical details like that, I wasn’t too surprised either, given that Apple pretty much single-handedly killed Motorola’s chip-fab division (forcing them to dump it, which then became Freescale), and that no one really expected IBM to make the same mistake by making and selling CPUs at a loss to Apple.
It was surprising because of the phenomenon described in this recent ARS article:
Quoting Hannibal:
Apple Computer, Inc. has "sold" slightly exotic, "technically superior," performance-oriented hardware for years, regardless of where the company’s products have actually stood vis-à-vis the PC on the performance ladder. Or, to put it differently, the "RISC" PowerPC architecture has been a core part of the Apple brand and the overall "mythology" of the Mac platform since the 68K transition, even if that architecture rarely delivered on company’s promises with benchmark numbers. So what Apple fans are mourning right now isn’t the loss of some actual technical superiority of the Mac hardware, but rather the loss of the perception of that hardware’s "technical superiority." Even more importantly, Mac enthusiasts are also mourning the loss of that perception’s role in the ongoing maintenance of the myth of Apple and of the Apple brand in the form in which these two have coexisted in the PowerPC era. [emphasis added]
The x86 PC’s >90% market share is comprised by pretty much everybody, most of whom view their computer as a means to an end, and couldn’t care less (if they even know) about the particulars of the CPU and ISA. Apple’s paltry 3% market share, on the other hand, is largely comprised of Mac fanboys.
I mean that in the nicest possible way, but the truth is that these Mac users choose to use Macs for no other reason than the fact that they are made by Apple. It has nothing whatsoever to do with performance or features, though they often try to argue that it does. In reality what matters to them is that 1) it’s made by Apple, and 2) it’s different than a PC.
That is the one reason this announcement is surprising. So much of the lure and appeal of the Mac has been the fact that it’s so "different" from the other personal computers on the market (which is to say, x86 PCs). The PowerPC architecture and CPU at the heart of the Mac was the biggest and most important difference between it and the PC. Now that is gone, and the loss for Mac users won’t be technical -- in that area they will gain, not lose -- it will be emotional, as in, their emotional attachment to the romance of what it means to be a Mac user. That won’t disappear entirely, of course, but a Macintosh running BSD on Intel x86 hardware is much less "Appley" than were the Macs running OS9 on PowerPC processors.
