It is specifically due to Apple's business model at the time. OS X is only for Macintosh computers and all Macs used PowerPC CPU's. There was a longstanding rumor of 'marklar', or OS X on Intel, which was verified when Apple moved to the Intel platform for their hardware. There were versions before 10.4 that were compiled for Intel, but never left Apple HQ.
A better question is why there were those two public x86 rhapsody builds at all.
NeXT was trying to get out of the hardware market, and as a result ported NextStep/OpenStep to a variety of hardware platforms. Presumably when Apple came along and decided to use it as their new OS the developers just continued the multi-plaform momentum until a little later when the official word came down that Apple would only support PPC.
It would have made some sense for them to continue Rhapsody/OS X on commodity Intel systems at least as a server OS. But that is not the Apple way. And that was right after Steve got back on board too.
I could be wrong on this, but whats interesting is that Apple has released the kernel Darwin for both PPC and Intel since 10.1. It;s last release is equivalent to 10.5 or 10.4...
Especially if Rosetta existed. That would be SO fun to play with on a VM. I've used every version of OS X and I still like Jaguar the best appearance wise.. would be really fun to give it a modern PC to play with.
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NeXT was trying to get out of the hardware market, and as a result ported NextStep/OpenStep to a variety of hardware platforms. Presumably when Apple came along and decided to use it as their new OS the developers just continued the multi-plaform momentum until a little later when the official word came down that Apple would only support PPC.
It would have made some sense for them to continue Rhapsody/OS X on commodity Intel systems at least as a server OS. But that is not the Apple way. And that was right after Steve got back on board too.