Walk-Off HBP sent in this article covering Apple's change in sourcing chips from IBM to Intel.
I don't think the reason was technical. IBM is capable of designing and fabricating the CPUs that Apple wants. The G5 and accompanying chipset architecture was nice. Maybe not the best of the best, or not for very long anyway, but competitive.
Today, IBM is designing very interesting and powerful CPUs in cooperation with (and under contract to) Microsoft, Sony, and Nintendo. These chips are a radical departure from IBM's bread and butter (the Cell in particular).
Given Apple's requirements for laptop, desktop, and server chips, IBM could get the job done, leveraging its traditional strengths in the server market combined with its new-found expertise in low-power, low-cost game consoles. There have been huge threads in the Macintoshian Achaia forum discussing exactly what IBM could do and how they could do it, all filled with (mostly) plausible scenarios. (Some of them even mentioned Freescale, née Motorola.)
So, why didn't it happen? I can think of two reasons, both of which probably contributed to the end result. First, it seems like IBM promised Apple something that it failed to deliver: a 3GHz G5 one year after the 2GHz G5 was announced. Steve Jobs stood on a public stage and declared it a fait acompli, presumably because IBM told him that it would happen. (Granted, this may be a big presumption, knowing Jobs...)
Two years later, a 3GHz G5 has not appeared. Steve Jobs looks foolish, and is undoubtedly pissed. This is the same guy who, back in the G4 days, famously (allegedly) told a senior Motorola executive, "I can't wait until we don't need you anymore." This happened in the middle a meeting about future CPUs that Apple still needed from Motorola!
Now Jobs is angry at IBM, and an angry Jobs is not pleasant to deal with. But things could be patched up, right? Maybe, but maybe IBM didn't see any reason to smooth things over and kiss the ring, as it were. Apple buys a lot of chips, but IBM CPUs are in every one of the three major upcoming game consoles. The market-share winner alone will assure tens of millions of CPU sales. And IBM doesn't really care who wins because they get paid for every single unit sold: Sony, Nintendo, or Microsoft. What's 5 million Macs a year compared to 20 million game consoles? And over 5 years, IBM can sell the "same chip" (maybe with fabrication refinements that save IBM money anyway) up to 100 million times. It's a lot harder to do that with a Mac (although Motorola sure tried...)
It's a simple equation really: angry Jobs plus an IBM that doesn't feel like it needs Apple anymore equals no more IBM CPUs for future Macs. The only remaining question is how much weight to assign to each component of the equation. I think Jobs was by far the biggest factor—not just his anger, but also how the Motorola experience shaped his thinking.
So maybe in the future you will be able to run Mac OS X on a PC intel box. That's a cool/scary prospect and a brave new world of computing for all.
- Art Neuro
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