The author of the article paints a picture of a situation in which expensive hardware was purchased on a whim without much planning beforehand. This hardware was ill suited to their task, and ultimately led to failure of the project while others (e.g., ARM) were quickly producing RISC designs with low budgets.

This sort of thing isn't uncommon in larger organizations that have money to burn on R&D. As a result, it's probably safe to say Apple was in a position that allowed them to burn a lot of money in the late 1980s.