What Led To Apple Dumping PowerPC
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Over the years, there has been a lot of tremendous speculation as to what would have caused Apple to dump the PowerPC architecture in favor for that of what Intel had to offer. After all, it was not all that long ago when Apple users made fun of Intel due to its support for the Windows world. Clearly, this tune has changed.
Despite what Steve Jobs claimed back in 2003, about the PowerPC being the wave of the future, it seems that the hype was short lived and pricing realities came home to roost as the eventual move was made to Intel CPUs.
So what started off as being an apparent cost consideration, allowed Apple to see the light of what Intel could provide and IBM, clearly, could not. Does this mean that PPC was a poor performer? Not really for its time, no. But the switch to today’s multi-core solutions as seen with Intel, really makes one wonder where Apple might have been today had they opted to stick it out with IBM and leave Intel at the door.
4 Comments
GadgetNut
June 17th, 2009
at 8:01am
Isn’t this somewhat similar to Apple’s recent waffling on the Firewire ports as well?
Tommyr
June 20th, 2009
at 11:26am
I still love my 5+ year old PPC Mini! It runs 24/7 and never let’s me down!
Gavin Roskamp
June 20th, 2009
at 11:34am
I am still running on all PPC G4s at my house, I’ve got an eMac G4, iMac G4, and PowerBook G4. They are all faster than my brand new PC with a dual-core AMD. (And I believe Intel is better than AMD, so you can imagine what I think of AMD)
Another thing is, they run nearly every program you need. Office, Leopard, Safari, Mail, iChat, iLife, iWork, pretty much everything except the latest mucho grande graphics intensive games and 3D movie editors. They play online games, they allow you to browse the web, they allow you to use XCode for God’s sake! They are perfect for me and I’m perfect for them. I just don’t see why the Mac world needs to be on Intel. Sure, dual and quad core processors, but sooner or later, IBM would be making those, wouldn’t they? The POWER architecture is the one used in supercomputers. Isn’t that what Apple used to call all of its computers? Now Apple is on Intel and they are pretty much PCs with a half decent case and the Mac OS. My eMac with a CRT is more beautiful than the fugly iMacs that are out now. (Sorry if you like them, they look fugly to me.)
So yeah. I really am hating Apple for cutting PPC off at Leopard and for switching to Intel in the first place.
Martyn McFarquhar
June 20th, 2009
at 1:58pm
I imagine leaving PowerPC chips instead of switching would have lead to a much smaller percentage of individuals adopting OS X. Having the multi-core Intel chips on board not only allow for a significant speed boost, but more importantly allows people the safety net of using Windows in virtualisation or natively. This safety-net is what I believe has helped Apple grow and grow, people are scared of switching, and the ability to use what they know if they need to is usually the deal-maker for a lot of consumers.