Comment by panick21_

They did basically. What happened is that Apple own CPU project crashed and burned. Then they had some meetings with people including DEC for Alpha and IBM. IBM offered POWER and IBM was also willing to go in on some other projects, like the next gen OS Teligent.

But Apple didn't want to drop Motorola fully. So Motorola, Apple and IBM figured out that with some tweaks to the 88000 the could turn it into something POWER like. And that thing was PowerPC that Motorola supplied to Apple. That's my understanding.