Shall we call this article "The PPC-x86 transition of Apple Macintosh"? Apple is more than Macintosh. Intel is more than x86. And how about "migration"? -- Toytoy 07:22, Jun 14, 2005 (UTC)

"Macintosh x86 migration"? --Ihope127 22:44, 3 September 2005 (UTC)[reply]

I believe there's an insanely huge POV or RDF hidden inside this article:

Motorola and IBM failed to deliver a 3 GHz chip so Apple has to jump the boat.

This sounds non-sense and Apple-centric to me. If I am right, the Macintosh marketshare has been falling for the past few years. Anyway, Apple's marketshare has always been miserable. If you cannot let IBM or Motorola earn money, you don't get your chips. No one drinks Cool-Aid this time. This is exactly Apple's situation today. The money flow to nurish newer PPCs drained. That's why Jobs gets nothing. 68k failed. Now PPC, as a personal computer CPU, also fails.

Apple's marketshare has always been too small to support its hardware advancements. SCSI failed. ADB failed. NuBus failed. ADC failed. LocalTalk failed. The list goes on and on. There exists an established pattern of hardware standard failures. I think IBM and Motorola are Jobs' scapegoats.

Is there a foundmental problem with the PPC design? If PPC makes money, why don't IBM and Motorola spend more money on the R&D? Fact: Apple fails to keep them well fed. -- Toytoy 06:11, Jun 14, 2005 (UTC)

I wouldn't say any of those "failed" except maybe in the context of the greater PC world. Parallel SCSI in particular became an important standard because the Mac embraced it early on. The others got replaced mainly because something better came along; ADB begat USB, NuBus was replaced by PCI, LocalTalk was replaced by Ethernet. ADC is really the only non-starter on the list. The same thing applies to PowerPC, in this case; it's by no means an abject failure, but it's not the best tool for the job at the moment, and I think Apple is smart for realising that. -lee 05:52, 22 Jun 2005 (UTC)

That's completely false. Apple's marketshare has been rising for the last several years. Their revenues, unit sales, and profits are the highest they've ever been, and this isn't due exclusively or even mostly to the iPod and iTunes: those are simply publicity grabbers.

PowerPC most certainly did not "fail". Apple, IBM and Motorola created it together, and it's an extremely good performer in many categories. It has nothing to do with Apple keeping IBM and Freescale (formerly Motorola) "well fed". Apple buys millions of dollars worth of CPUs from both companies. However, IBM's (and Freescale's) focus is on an even bigger market for PowerPC: embedded communications, networking, vehicle controls, speciality devices, and so on, and now, all three of the major next generation gaming consoles. PowerPC powered all of Apple's products for over a decade, and continues to be heavily used by IBM in high-end servers and workstations. So while yes, I guess you could semantically argue that as a *desktop* processor, PowerPC "failed", I'd beg to differ. It's just time to move on. Did 80x86 "fail" because it was time to move to Pentium?

Further, yes, in the early days, the Apple hardware platform was very proprietary. However, I take great issue with the basis of some of your claims. Things like ADB and LocalTalk were around before there were any comparable standards to even do those jobs! The rest of the industry may not have picked them up (in part because of Apple's early closed systems), but things like LocalTalk and ADB, and even NuBus, were light years ahead of other competitors. At the time, SCSI was picked because it was the better technology: IDE/ATA was not a clear winner at the time, and SCSI was clearly better. Market dynamics and economics ended up meaning that when the PC industry at large picked IDE/ATA, it ended up being the winner because the market forced prices down, and PCs were, and continue to be, all about price and being a commodity. Even today, SCSI didn't "lose": it's still used in high performance applications where speed and other performance factors are key. Only today is SCSI being outmoded by other technologies. But I will concede that it lost *on the desktop*. But that's not the fault of Apple picking the arguably superior technologies, and where they didn't exist, creating their own. Moreover, Apple's inclusion of USB in the iMac, and the deletion of the floppy and all legacy ports, is viewed as one of the largest catalysts for USB in the entire industry. The PC industry never was so bold. ADC was a damned good idea: dual channel DVI and analog (you could use an ADC connector with DVI or VGA displays), integrated with power and USB and FireWire in one cable. It was completely open. But it never took off. Now, Apple has standardized on DVI.

Today's Macs are a virtual who's who of international and open standards in the hardware and software: ethernet (including the first mass market machines to ship with GigE), PCI, DVI, HD-15 VGA, USB, FireWire (IEEE-1394), Open Firmware (IEEE-1275), 802.11/WiFi, Bluetooth, PCI, PCI-X, ATA/SATA, etc., even implementing some standards before anyone in the PC industry has. You take WiFi for granted now; look where Apple was with AirPort two *years* before any comparably priced offerings were available in the PC marketplace, to say nothing of the additional two years it took to get remotely comparable ease of use with Windows XP SP2. The OS is based on completely open standards whenever possible, and while the whole OS itself is proprietary, the entire core OS is open source. Mac OS X is the single most desirable operating system in many scientific, life/bio-science, engineering, and even some IT marketplaces.

When Apple went to the G5 (IBM PowerPC 970), IBM promised 3GHz by 12 months from that date. Sure, no one can predict the future perfectly, but they missed that target by *over a year*. What was Apple to do? Now that Apple has removed the last vestige of what could even be remotely called non-mainstream hardware from their computers - namely, the CPU - and you still chastise them, while getting in factually incorrect jabs about how Apple's marketshare is decreasing; surely, Apple is around the corner from certain death! As it has been, apparently, for nigh on 30 years.

I'm not disagreeing that there wasn't POV garbage in the original article; what I'm saying is that your grossly overstated position is itself POV. Granted, it's not in the actual article, but neither is my reply. Apple absolutely switched from PowerPC because it was time. And it wasn't so much that they couldn't keep IBM and Motorola/Freescale "well fed", its that they couldn't keep them well fed at prices that would allow Apple to be more competitive in the general PC marketplace. This decision is nothing but a good one, and makes Macs essentially high-end, high-quality PCs. The ability to now run Mac OS X PLUS any x86 OS in a sure-to-exist virtual machine/vmware-like environment on a sleek Apple laptop (Apple hardware is consistently and continuously ranked #1, ahead of all other manufacturers, in quality, support, lack of need for repairs, and so on, by leading consumer organizations like Consumer Reports) will be a major coup for Apple.

In closing, your incorrect analysis is unfortunately somewhat common. I hope this helps to clear things up. - das@doit.wisc.edu

This article's problem isn't POV. The problem is the fact that it isn't an encyclopedia article; it's an essay full of opinion and analysis. It needs major work. Tverbeek 17:07, 19 Jun 2005 (UTC)

I just finished up some heavy editing of the important bits, and I went ahead and deleted the whole Future section since it's not really relevant to the article, being mostly off-topic analysis. The Hurdles section could still use some rearranging, but most of the POV problems should be fixed now, hopefully. Let me know if there's anything I missed. -lee 05:45, 22 Jun 2005 (UTC)