Re: [NTLK] [OT]Concerning Apple's Switch to Intel Chips...

From: Matt Baker (bakerspage_at_mac.com)
Date: Wed Jun 08 2005 - 21:52:35 PDT


>
> But IBM had made no progress in nearly 2 years with the G4 / G5 series
> and Apple could not sit and wait until they did.
>
> So, Apple had a contingency plan to be able to move to a different
> architecture, and did so.
>

So it begs the question why wait so long? They had System 7 with
quicktime on a 486 in the early '90s. Early OS X wannabe's in '96 and
'97 ran on x86. OS X was on X86 since 2001. They "sat and waited" for
Motorola for much longer than 2 years, having to push out dual 1.42's
while P4's were starting to hit 3Ghz.

So, 15 YEARS of X86 experience for the Mac OS and they switched to
IBM why? Seems like a decision made in haste. Did IBM give a good
pitch to make G5's that fit in laptops? I understand the pressure to
make laptop-ready chips, but the G4 took a long time to make it to a
laptop size, and while IBM had decent Thinkpads, they didn't run on
IBM cpu's. Woulda loved to be in that meeting.

Also, I laugh at the idea that we should be happy with moving back to
32 bit P4's.. makes me nostalgic for the Mac 128k, which was 32 bit
in 1984.

Matt

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