Intel has been trying for years to advance the PC, but they keep getting held back by the mass-market nature of the platform. People would rather have older technology very cheaply than better technology that costs more.
According to John "Hannibal" Stokes'
article on Ars Technica, it seems that Apple likes cheap CPUs, too, and even squeezed IBM so hard that IBM lost interest in the deal.
It seems that Apple used to pay less than half the price of a Pentium for PowerPC CPUs. No wonder Freescale couldn't deliver on improving CPU performance.
