Comment by wpietri

And this story leaves unanswered the question of why they compromised on a suboptimal architecture in the first place. In my experience, 95% of the time it's due to some other constraint imposed by an executive. E.g., a made-up ship date.

So it's perfectly possible that had the head of graphics gone for what he knew was the ideal solution in the first place, he would have been yelled at by Jobs for that. It wouldn't be the first time that a HiPPO caused a boss to do a 180 and implicitly blame the underlings rather than own up.