I am not arguing semantics, I was just trying to figure out what you meant.

In reading over what you wrote, it seems like you are compressing the timeline and combining products.

The PowerPC 601 was not an execution fiasco was it? Time Magazine named it the Product of the Year in 1994.

The bankruptcy situation was in the in the mid 90's, but after Steve came back, he righted the ship and Apple even retired all of its debt early. They were not in any financial risk at the time of the switch to intel chips.

Apple used PowerPC for almost 13 years before switching to Intel, and it was a great CPU. Apple could have continued using PowerPC and been fine, although mobile performance for laptops would not have been as good because of the difference in power consumption.

The switch to intel and the iphone were developed completely separately, not even on the same corporate campus. The teams were ignorant of each other. The iPhone has never used an intel CPU, and its popularity in the marketplace was completely unaffected by the CPU roadmap of Apple's laptop and desktop line.

If Apple had not switched to intel they would have continued on with the PowerPC chips and the laptops would have not been as great energy consumption wise, but they would have been just fine, and most people would not have known the difference.

The digital hub strategy was pre-Intel switch by several years, also would have been unaffected by it.

If you back out the ipad, iphone, and ipod lines, and just look at the laptop/desktop part of the company, then you get a sense of what apple would look like from the perspective of the intel switch. A small, profitable company with great products, but it is clear that the iPod, iPhone, and iPad were the real engine of the company, the reason they are a consumer electronics juggernaut, and that all had nothing to do with Intel - that was all Samsung, Motorola/IBM, Qualcomm and PA Semiconductor.