Given the switch from PowerPC to Intel its unsurprising that Apple is keeping itself options open. I suspect that if Intel doesn't deliver the power consumption

Given the switch from PowerPC to Intel its unsurprising that Apple is keeping itself options open. I suspect that if Intel doesn't deliver the power consumption/performance ratio that Apple needs they would happily switch to a processor that does. Given that at one point NeXTStep supported 4 different processor architectures (Motorola, Intel, Sparc, HP) the underlying system is probably one of the "easier" operating systems to port to new processor architectures.