[beokop]

Apple isn't going down this road again because it's "in their culture", they're doing it because it puts them at an advantage and because they can. Changing the architecture means changes from the silicon level to the application level; it's not so much about engineering talent as it is controlling the entire stack. Still, 30 years later, Apple is the only company that could pull it off.

[jon-wood]

There has to be at least a little bit of culture having an impact here, even if only in the sense of people being able to say they've done a wholesale change of architecture before so they should be able to do it again. Also the culture of being responsible for the entire stack including hardware, OS, and software gives them a lot more flexibility than somewhere like Dell where they'd have to go through extensive negotiation with Microsoft to make a change to CPU architecture fly.