The economies of scale comment was simply that back before the Pentium Pro, most people thought that RISC was going to take over since it is such a better syste

The economies of scale comment was simply that back before the Pentium Pro, most people thought that RISC was going to take over since it is such a better system, but because Intel is able to sell so many chips it can afford to throw extra engineers at the problem and add things like out of order execution to the x86. Or rather there are much more important things than the ISA's technical merit when considering what is the best chip to use. Plus I don't think that Apple has a chance, or they will have anything to gain by making its own chips for desktops and laptops. The absurdity of "running OS X well is that OS X is not that special. If he means "running everything better" than it makes sense, because these are general purpose processors, and there is just a small set of instructions that are basically the same for all architectures. x86 is not the best ISA, but the Core 2 Duo is an excellent chip, and it's hard to make a better chip no matter what ISA you are using.