PowerPC chips had some advantages over Intel, which was why they were used to create supercomputers for a while, and were picked to power the first Xbox. Power

PowerPC chips had some advantages over Intel, which was why they were used to create supercomputers for a while, and were picked to power the first Xbox. PowerPC’s biggest flaw was power efficiency, a situation which became critical as Apple’s sales skewed toward laptops. The G5 was a beast but it ate power like a beast too; it was never going to work in a laptop, and so Apple had to switch.