OS4 moves to x86. What happens next?

[kolla]

@ persia

I am a bit of a old romantic so anything I say will certainly be from that vain I suppose! To my mind there was an argument for PowerPC as the logical successor to 64k as the Mac had very similar lineage to the Amiga and went that way - I always looked at the Mac as  what might have happened next with the Amiga without Commodore's demise

You can pretty much thank Apple for the death of PowerPC desktop machine, and it has nothing to do with Apple switching to Intel CPUs a few years ago, but everything to do with Apple killing off the CHRP in the mid-late '90ies when they refused to license MacOS to "clones", before any other desktop OS had managed to establish themselves on the PowerPC. And you can ask IBM and Freescale (Motorola back then) what they thought of it at the time.

Oh, and it's 68k, not 64k

[kolla]

You forgot a few...

3. Darwin, the core of OSX, had already been running on x86 many years already
4. NextStep, the OS from which the "upper layers" of OSX was developed, was also running on x86 for many years already.

Really, the switch to Intel from PowerPC for Apple was really a simple one, the biggest obstacle was to have all the application developers do the switch as well, some of them were just finnished moving their apps from OS9, many still hanging onto toolkits that existed in OSX only for providing easier porting from OS9. And then Apple switched again, leaving 32bit behind... some of the application developing companies are rather exhausted at this point