Thanks, interests facts and interpretation. No need to be snippy though, I appreciate and respect your points.
The reason for the change to Intel was the laptop line was still stuck in G4 error and G5's were no-where in sight due to heat issues. Was Apple's laptop release updates as frequent as that in the PowerPC days. Apple knew their future was in portable devices.
Also, I think I can explain in part that rapid fire approach with the PowerPC lines:
1. Some of those revisions were to fix hardware defects. G4 and G5s had their fare share of these.
2. Apple was finding its feet again and felt it had to try new things and catch up to the PC after the dark days of the 90s. This was the era of Job's return and the beginning's of Ive's rise.
3. Don't forget too the transition to OS X from the classic days which added more overhead.
4. Peripheral component technology ( ie. GPUs, bus speed, I/O standards) changed rapidly
That era saw the decline of floppies, serial ports, IDE, SCSI, USB1.0, Firewire 400, AGP and several older Apple proprietary protocols.
This was changing much faster than it does today. Today, we've put much more functionality onto the CPU die and the industry has settled on USB3 and Thunderbolt and that's been stable for the last 5 years. Even a change in front-side bus warranted a new revision where today, we've got DMA directly talking to RAM.
5. Apple no longer give a damn about desktops but back in the mid 2000s, laptops had not yet reached the dominant form factor. The G4 was very likely their bread and butter and so it warranted their attention. They still catered to creative professional as their biggest market. The Mac Pro by contrast has never had this status.
