The switch from 68k to PowerPC was because 68k was dead, Motorola was pushing the 88k which was already failing in the market, and while Apple also considered o

The switch from 68k to PowerPC was because 68k was dead, Motorola was pushing the 88k which was already failing in the market, and while Apple also considered other architectures like SPARC, they didn't want to be tied to only a single company's fortunes again like they were with the 68k. So when IBM came to them asking "hey how about we scale down POWER to a desktop chip for you?" Apple also brought in Motorola so that they could dual-source their chips and not be dependent on one company, and PowerPC was born. Rather than being an up-and-coming competitor, PowerPC probably wouldn't exist without Apple's involvement (they would probably still have pursued a scaled-down POWER, but it wouldn't be PowerPC)