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Why Apple moved to Intel: IBM decided not to make the G5 for portable

news.com.com — Neat interview explaining how Jobs wanted to switch to Intel a long time ago, among other things. "I've seen both sides of the Apple story because I sold the G5 to Steve (Jobs) the first time he wanted to move to Intel."

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  • gbm85, on 10/12/2007, -5/+0+Old News
  • dusingaz, on 10/12/2007, -2/+0+New Article
    +New Details
  • Muzical84, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1I've been curious about this myself. Thanks for posting this. :)
  • longofest, on 10/12/2007, -3/+0Duplicate. Original at http://digg.com/apple/The_Future_of_PowerPC
  • jediboytj, on 10/12/2007, -1/+0good informative article!

    forget about all the 'dupe' and 'old' cryers... for some reason, some digg members seem to think that anything more than 24hrs in the past is old... talk about short attention spans...
  • roguepirate, on 10/12/2007, -0/+0Bearly figured this out now?
  • longofest, on 10/12/2007, -1/+0jediboyti: did you see the original article? it was posted a few hours before this, and is the SAME ARTICLE
  • blixel, on 10/12/2007, -0/+0I'm just curious how is Apple going to spin the truth with regards to the move to Intel. For years they have been hammering it into people's minds that x86 is inferior. No one believed them (except Mac zealots), but that was the message they were delivering never-the-less. Does Apple expect everyone to just forget what they have been preaching all these years?

    BTW, I'm not a Mac hater. I own an iBook, an iPod, and a iSight.
  • larowebr, on 10/12/2007, -0/+0@blixel

    They'll probably spin it in the program and os architecture direction. They'll say that since the OS is built better than Windows XP, Vista, etc, that the demands on the chips won't be that great. And in theory, that'd be correct. Well designed programs can efficiently use computing cycles and not require a massive amount of computational power.
  • gbm85, on 10/12/2007, -3/+0"forget about all the 'dupe' and 'old' cryers... for some reason, some digg members seem to think that anything more than 24hrs in the past is old... talk about short attention spans..."

    At least I can ***** count. This "news" is at least months old.
  • ManiacFive, on 10/12/2007, -0/+0Even my grandmother knows why apple moved to intel. This is a nice informative little article about Freescale Semiconducter. The title is very misleading, its got nothing new about Apple.
  • stewacide, on 10/12/2007, -0/+0I've suspected the cold shoulder from IBM was the reason.
  • antiTRACE, on 10/12/2007, -0/+0it was less than 3% for IBM, why waste time/money on a whiny-ass company such as Apple? When Apple is greater than 2% of the world wide comptuer market, I'm sure they'll have more of a leverage.
  • starman, on 10/12/2007, -0/+0Wasn't this obvious from the beginning? No digg.
  • trogdor282, on 10/12/2007, -0/+0The apple part is old news but i was fascinated by the second page about how well PowerPC is doing in the embedded market. I didn't know it was used beyond apples, consoles and servers.
  • JasonHD, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1How is Apple a whiny ass company? Every company looks out for itself, you self righteous ass's cannot see that every company in the world acts the same. If they didn't they would be out of business.
  • cquinnd, on 10/12/2007, -0/+0@blixel and larowebr

    IIRC, I don't think Apple ever said that x86 was "inferior", as in
    not a good chip. They instead promoted the G5 (and Altivec) as
    "superior" or a better code engine than what the other chip makers
    were offering at the time.

    Now times have changed:

    Apple can get the same or better performance from the x86 side that they
    used to get from the high end apps on the G5; so they don't need to push
    Altivec as hard anymore.

    Apple also did not have OSX ready for the transition when they moved
    up from the PowerPC chips, waiting a little longer does give them a
    better platform from which to make the change.

  • EmilioLizardo, on 10/12/2007, -1/+0The Jobs lie about Apple being forced to use the POS Intel chips continues to unravel.

    Hilarious!

    It will be even better watching Jobs try to spin the garbage Intel has lined up for 2006 - that is if more chips don't get canceled by Intel.

    Apple was really starting to kick ass and all that is going to be lost when the slow and hot Intel system show up next year. Jobs is getting what he deserves.

  • cakefart, on 10/12/2007, -1/+0Propaganda aside, face it... The PPC arch is great for embedded devices, but stinks for general computing.

    IBM never wanted a competitor to their POWER arch, and Motorola couldn't get a clue if it was dropped from an orbiting nuke platform and Schaumburg was ground zero. Their semiconductor division (now Freescale) has always been about controllers for communications and automobiles, and always will be.
  • master_of_fm, on 10/12/2007, -1/+0@EmilioLizardo

    obviously you have not been following the whole Apple Intel switch story. In the keynote when they annouced the switch they said that it was for performance per watt. have you even seen pics if the inside of the developer kits? there is only like one fan for the cpu no more, now look inside a g5 tower there is like 8 fans. while intel cpu's run hot compared to amd they run much cooler than a g5. one of the reasons for the switch is so they can use the pentium m in powerbooks. also if you look through any of the forums they say that the osx86 systems are faster even the homebuilt ones.

    ***** apple fanboys
  • EmilioLizardo, on 10/12/2007, -2/+0"In the keynote when they annouced the switch they said that it was for performance per watt"

    Hahahahahahaha!!!

    I guess that ***** is better than coming out on stage and saying we were such a pain in the ass for IBM that they decided just to dump us. Now we f-ed and have nowhere to go but Intel. Sorry.

    "also if you look through any of the forums they say that the osx86 systems are faster even the homebuilt ones."

    Oh god, I won't even bother with that gem.

    Loooooooooooooosers! I am going to be laughing my ass off all through 2006 at the crap Apple is going to putting out.

  • Boondoggle, on 10/12/2007, -1/+0"Loooooooooooooosers! I am going to be laughing my ass off all through 2006 at the crap Apple is going to putting out."

    Good luck with that...
  • zeroreality, on 10/12/2007, -0/+0Great article! However the title to your digg story is very misleading. The article was definitely more about Freescale except for a small portion, regard Apple.

    Good story, bad headline. No digg.
  • blixel, on 10/12/2007, -0/+0"Good story, bad headline."

    You must be new here.
  • zeroreality, on 10/12/2007, -0/+0Nope. Just didn't like the fact that the headline screamed Apple, while the entire article was about Freescale. A more accurate headline would read, "Thanks to Apple is the PowerPC dead? Not if Freescale has anything to say about it".
  • johnpombrio, on 10/12/2007, -0/+0 Heh, I worked in the embedded microprocessor emulation field for years and we had a saying "0% of microprocessors go into PC's" Embedded processors are 99.997% more numerous than those big CPU processors that Intel and AMD make. Take out the rounding error and you get 0%. I have seen embedded processors that easily fit on an eraser of a pencil befoe packaging. They are dirt cheap and run programs that have nothing to do with Linux or C++. Most are 4 bit or 8 bit (still!) but are quickly creeping up on 16 and 32 bit as these chips get cheaper.
  • master_of_fm, on 10/12/2007, -0/+0@EmilioLizardo

    also IBM had a hard time delivering G5 chips in volume and on time. something intel can do in there sleep. just out of curiousity what do you do for a living?

    @Boondoggle
    thanks
  • sfacets, on 10/12/2007, -0/+0IBM just COULDN'T make them without the overheat factor - not very practical in a portable...
  • pr0t0, on 10/12/2007, -0/+0Hey, take it easy there master_of_fm!

    As a matter of fact, Pentiums typically ran much hotter than their PPC counterparts. That is until Intel learned a few things, dropped the megahertz myth, and came out with Pentium M series of desktop and laptop chips. Now they have comparable performance while running a little slower, and a little cooler.

    Further, while Intel's roadmap seems to show their processor performance will eventually significantly outperform the future offerings from IBM, this hasn't been the case yet. In fact, most real-world testing shows the G5s outperforming the P4s. Of course, this has to be taken with at least a few grains of salt. There's usually an agenda by the tester and it is difficult effectively compare the two processors (it's not like the OS has nothing to do with performance).

    I have used both G5s and P4s and my experience has been that the G5 system typically outperforms the P4 system. It's not laboratory testing, but I don't care about that. I just the apps I'm using to perform as quickly as possible.
  • master_of_fm, on 10/12/2007, -0/+0@pr0t0

    preaching to the choir dude. I used to be an Intel fan (my 875 system rocked) but when it came time to build a new system I looked at what Intel and AMD had to offer, I went AMD. When I went to the Intel technical solutions training in July I asked why my Athlon64 system ran so much cooler than the current Intel offerings, it just pissed him off. The one thing Intel has actually done right recently is the Pentium M.

    I almost bought a Mac mini for my wife, just because I think there cool and I wanted a chance to play with OSX. I will probably pickup an Intel Powerbook when the come out because I love the design and styling, you don't find anything close to it in the PC world. My biggest problem with apple has been that you can’t build a Mac, with any luck or maybe some good hacking that will be a possibility. I couldn't believe how quick and snappy osx86 was on my athlon64 and this wasn't even close to optimized like it is on a dev box.

    But because my job is supporting windows users I always have to keep a foot in the Microsoft pool. I can never completely convert. Believe me after supporting windows users I wish I could.

    Lastly, it just really bugs me when people don't like your idea or don't like something and they are like "well yah, ***** you, how do you like me now bitch” especially when all they have to say is conjecture and has absolutely no backing or basis. In other words they say that something will be, simply because they said so.

    "Better to remain silent and be thought a fool than to speak out and remove all doubt."

    - Abraham Lincoln
  • Laughingman234, on 10/12/2007, -0/+0ummm when you move for mhz/watt...couple that with the demand for g5 laptopt thats not there...I say Duh...
  • jonhenshaw, on 10/12/2007, -0/+0Interesting interview/article.
  • sourbrew, on 10/12/2007, -0/+0pfffft - it was because apple needed that sli slot so they could still claim to be gfx tasty, and because of the trusted drm chipset they will be spearing all the "fan boys" balls with come february.
  • SVPirate, on 10/12/2007, -0/+0PCI-express could easily have been worked into a PowerPC design. It's been adapted for AMD's CPU chipsets, so it's not like it's an Intel only standard.

    If it wasn't for IBM and Michael Mayer, Steve would probably have ditched the G4 when it first ran out of steam 3 years ago. As it was they managed to stave off that by giving him the G5. Jobs used Intel latterly at NeXT, and the NeXTSTEP OS was already established on Intel. Jobs was no part fo the switch to PowerPC in the first instance either, so he felt it wasn't right from the get-go. It's only been tolerated this long becuase it's been suprisingly useful, but now Freescale have spun-off into other markets and IBM have rolled up into a spikey ball with Nintendo, XBox and PS3 stickers all over it (that was a thinly veiled Sonic the Hedgehog/games console reference if you didn't get it!). IBM refused to put the G5 into a portable package (it'd have been a mission and a half to do anyway and wouldn't have made economic sense for IBM) it's heeling Apple's laptop line-up severely. People hacking OS X Intel onto Pentium M and Centrino laptops have show that it outperforms the G4 powerbooks across the board.

    This isn't about screwing fan boys, conceeding to the world of Wintel or anything of that sort. It's about Apple being able to build computers with the best parts to get the bast returns. Using Intel CPUs puts the Mac in a stronger postition from a speed, power economy, and possible in the long run price POV. It also put it in a stronger position as a computing platform as it will run Windows and Linux x86 (and it will - mark my words ot will and it won't be as hard as some people think). It's about selling hardware. Simple as that.

    Interesting aside - a friend of mine is really confused becuase he's trying to buy a new PC. Even buying from a vendor like Dell is a complete mind job. I pointed him at the Apple Store and he found exactly what he wanted in 5 mins. It was a G5 iMac and was less expensive than he thought. Now apply that thinking to Intel computers that will run Windows. Isn't that a nice thougt?
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