I'm a little behind on this one but it's still blog-worthy. News.com ran an interview with Michael Mayer, CEO of Freescale Semiconductor. In this interview Mayer let out an important tidbit of information and rather than paraphrase immediately I'll just quote it.

From the interview: Weren't you there during the discussions when IBM convinced Apple to adopt the G5? Mayer: In my previous job, I ran IBM's semiconductor business. So I've seen both sides of the Apple story, because I sold the G5 to Steve (Jobs) the first time he wanted to move to Intel.

Five years ago?
Mayer: Yeah, that's about right. So I sold the G5. First I told IBM that we needed to do it, and then I sold it to Apple that the G5 was good and it was going to be the follow-on of the PowerPC road map for the desktop. It worked pretty well. And then IBM decided not to take the G5 into the laptop and decided to really focus its chip business on the game consoles.

And there you have it, folks. I don't think there's any need for me to say anything more than that.