Could Sun Have SPARC’d Apple’s Mac?

Sun Microsystems cofounder Bill Joy shined some sunlight on the fact that Apple in fact was considering Sun’s CPU during the time it was courting IBM for the PowerPC and was close, oh so close, to going with it. Like all great tales, it fell apart in the final moments.

What would have life been like if Apple passed IBM and its PowerPC for Sun’s SPARC chip all those years ago? Would we have all seen the MacBook Pro Tuesday or would it have been the MacSPARC Pro? Could Sun have ignited the power Apple was thirsting for? I doubt it.

Look to Sun’s own struggling line of computers. The SPARCstations are great - and I mean great - workstations, but look also at the cost of them. Bank sometimes doesn’t even begin to describe it. The CPU is just too expensive along with the rest of the hardware. Sun tried to entice the PC crowd by offering Solaris for the Intel chip in hopes that it would attract more to the Sun platform, but that failed too.

Further, how many SPARC laptops have you seen? Not many. Power and heat are big issues and this was one of the main reasons PowerBooks never saw anything more in the upgrade department. A PowerPC G5 just couldn’t be shrunk down into a notebook form factor. Niether would the SPARC chip. In fact, it may have never found its way into a notebook and things would have been even worse for the Apple high-end laptop.

It would have been interesting to see Sun CPUs in Macs but I just don’t think it would have been a wise move. I think that’s why in the end Apple passed on it. It had enough foresight to know that as hot as SPARC chips were, the flames would have died long before the PowerPC chips did.

[tags]macbook,intel,cpu,sun,sparc[/tags]