The dispute between Motorola came about after Mark McDermott, formal head of Somerset Design Center in Texas where PowerPC processors were designed, was hired by Intel. Goldman Sachs raised its recommendation on AAPL this morning. Investors page has more coverage of the news. Another EETimes article talks about IBM's implementation of X-ray lithography technology on prototype PowerPC processors. We will be tracking Apple's financial news very closely on AAPL Investors page.
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Your Mac has posted a link to an utility for determining whether the PowerPC 750 processor in your computer is copper based or not. G3 processors from Motorola are copper based. I contacted two representatives at Motorola concerning this issue over a month ago and they confirmed that current crop of PowerPC 750 from Motorola are still based on aluminum wires and are NOT produced on copper process. 333-400MHz G3s from IBM, on the other hand, do have copper interconnects. The latest G3 chips from Motorola are produced under the HiP 3.4 process which is a hybrid of HiP3 and HiP4.