re secure, American CPUs
I think the concern here may be the one raised by the Lenovo acquisition of IBM's desktop and notebook businesses, which had some in congress asking during hearings whether it'd left US government buyers with Thinkpads vulnerable to Chinese sabotage via low-level hidden nefarious things secreted on the Chinese-made machines. The "designed by Apple in California" label apparently means something to some folks, regardless that fabbing is universally subcontracted to Taiwan, or Singapore, or the like.
The question whether a non-x86 CPU might have some security benefit isn't a complete lark, by the way. Features like W^X work best on chips with hardware support for page-level granularity of memory permissions, for example. Since FreeBSD targets x86, W^X hasn't been a big deal on FreeBSD as it has on OpenBSD, but Apple could certainly do things like contribute code to the tree for support of other platforms. Does Apple really care enough about security to build stuff like this on a preventative basis? From my interactions via email with Apple's Jordan Hubbard, I kinda doubt it. I don't think he gets it.
I happen to think the Return of the PPC sounds silly (at least for desktop and laptops), but I'm willing to conduct a little thought experiment. x86 helps MacOS X adoption at present because it lower the barrier to switchers, and switchers are reportedly still half of Apple's buyers (or at least half of Apple's Apple Store buyers, I'd have to check the conf call to make sure which they meant). Fast forward five years in your imagination. If Apple's sales continue to be half to switchers for several more years, the need to offer a migration path will have dwindled terribly, as the non-MSFT share of the market would be likely half or more. PPC in the short-term is silly. PPC in the long term might be a very valuable alternative to keep alive -- especially if there's a family of buyers for the tech already. But let's face it: a few tens of thousands of units over several years isn't the size of market Apple would need to make this buy a good payoff, so I doubt existing defense contracts are a plausible reason to buy in. And Apple has seemingly telegraphed lack of interest in the current products or the existing roadmap.
Apple has, however, already bought an embedded graphics chip design firm, seemingly to acquire its IP and personnel. Apple may have something interesting in the works, in particular for products that aren't part of the traditional "PC" market. An Apple-designed portable platform could easily be built by some stranger in Singapore or Taiwan (and its processors at TI or at IBM or even Intel, under contract), and it's not crazy to imagine Apple might have the unit volume to support this at a competitive price. The future's interesting-looking.
Take care,
--Tex.
