Unfortunately, they clearly don't give a **** about the Mac Pro, and 2019 blip aside, have been trying to kill it since 2012.
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Did anyone else feel hoodwinked when the Intel switch was announced ?
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Unfortunately, they clearly don't give a **** about the Mac Pro, and 2019 blip aside, have been trying to kill it since 2012.
Hear here!
It’s a remarkable fantasy to believe — to have the faith — that growth (and profiting on that growth) is infinite. Many rude awakenings await a lot of folks who believe their investments will, in perpetuity (and when held long enough), yield them a cosy nest egg for retirement, if not beforehand. Unfortunately, that rude awakening is going to be ugly and probably cruel to a lot of other folks.
Again, I’m in concordance here.
It's pretty much this I was alluding to in my original comment in this thread.
Imaging being the Mac apologist and evangelist the day after the Intel switch. I was not one, but I heard all about it from various sources and places before the switch - and then the silence afterwards.
I was using PowerPC Macs by the time of the switch, but only three years into it after having switched myself. And I still had a solid three years of use with my TiBook 400 before it would fail and I'd be diving deeper into PowerPC. So, from my perspective, I didn't have a whole lot of trust in Apple and was never drinking the Koolaid - even if I was using the product.
One of the advantages of being so far behind the current model is getting real experience with the marketing exaggerations from the year your Mac model was sold.
They could still fall back on the superior usability and reliability of macOS compared to Windows. But yeah, it would surely make them wonder if all the 'megahertz myth' stuff was, in retrospect, just hot air to excuse the lack of progress on the PPC side...
For a time…then Apple quality started to degrade. Oh, it's still of some level better today, but higher end PCs and parts can match the quality. It just used to be far better.
I had a job from 2004 to 2018 with a small newspaper. When I came in they were PC, but did have a couple G4 Macs. In the 14.5 years I was in that job I saw the editorial computers turn over three times. When I left, both G4s, the G5 bought in 2005 and the MacPro bought in 2013 were still functioning and being used. The company was also on it's second PC server then as well.
But I never actively advocated for Mac to my boss - I let the Macs speak for me. Every time he brought in a new PC for me to set up there was a grimace on his face, some regret that it was yet another PC and not a Mac. Some people just get stuck in a rut. However, I am glad I never evangelized Mac to him. He'd have had something to throw back at me when the Intel transition occurred.
Out in the real world, rather than in this little echo chamber of self-affirming expertise, I don't recall anyone much noticing, or caring, about the switch to Intel from PPC. Apple were a small company, with a small user base, some cool products, a loud CEO and it wasn't as if they were the first, or last, to switch tack or change direction - it happens all the time.
I'll try and avoid generalizing my personal views into assumed facts of what others knew or didn't, and what and how Apple planned their product lines, and stick to just what I know. In that regard, I'd been an Apple user for about 20 years, and had a G4 Sawtooth, G5, and two G4 Mac minis. It seemed inevitable to me that Apple would change direction because there were no alternatives, and while I understood the few dozen or so people who posted complaints in Apple's own support forum about how they'd been cheated with Apple switching to Intel, the fact was that just like me, their PPC systems still worked, did the exact same job they had before, and they were in no way negatively impacted by the switch.
Apple's about face was clumsy, but inevitable in some form, and the question of why it had got to that point was totally pointless since on the outside, nobody would ever really know. Nor did all that many people I knew as Apple users care in the slightest about performance differences between PPC and Intel because that wasn't why we bought and used Macs. The jewel in the crown wasn't the architecture, it was MacOS and the sheer quality of user experience compared to Windows.
That wasn't down to MHz, myth or not, it was far less complex because it boiled down to the fact that in building the hardware and the OS, and controlling much of the software development through interface guidelines, the experience was a tighter and better focused system. For the kind of work I was doing, that was a crucial difference in experience and usability, and a big reason why tried and tested Macs stayed in service, while PCs got switched out more routinely.
That said, since I was still using my Sawtooth well into 2016, I was clearly more concerned about the job it did than the speed it ran - comparative to Intel systems or in isolation.
To me, the only problem with the Intel switch was that when any of my Macs, including those I managed, needed to be replaced, I had the marginal complication of whether software compatibility would be an issue. Since Apple hadn't quite reached the point of switching MacOS every year, my own transition to Intel was barely noticeable.
I never saw Steve Jobs as anything other than a salesman, so while he was a driving influence in the business, what he had to say was nothing more than fluff. His thoughts on the PPC and then his praise of Intel were nothing more than that of a car salesman switching from a Ford dealership to a Chevy one. His job was to sell what Apple built, and he was pretty good at that, even when having to change his mind.
I'll try and avoid generalizing my personal views into assumed facts of what others knew or didn't, and what and how Apple planned their product lines, and stick to just what I know. In that regard, I'd been an Apple user for about 20 years, and had a G4 Sawtooth, G5, and two G4 Mac minis. It seemed inevitable to me that Apple would change direction because there were no alternatives, and while I understood the few dozen or so people who posted complaints in Apple's own support forum about how they'd been cheated with Apple switching to Intel, the fact was that just like me, their PPC systems still worked, did the exact same job they had before, and they were in no way negatively impacted by the switch.
Apple's about face was clumsy, but inevitable in some form, and the question of why it had got to that point was totally pointless since on the outside, nobody would ever really know. Nor did all that many people I knew as Apple users care in the slightest about performance differences between PPC and Intel because that wasn't why we bought and used Macs. The jewel in the crown wasn't the architecture, it was MacOS and the sheer quality of user experience compared to Windows.
That wasn't down to MHz, myth or not, it was far less complex because it boiled down to the fact that in building the hardware and the OS, and controlling much of the software development through interface guidelines, the experience was a tighter and better focused system. For the kind of work I was doing, that was a crucial difference in experience and usability, and a big reason why tried and tested Macs stayed in service, while PCs got switched out more routinely.
That said, since I was still using my Sawtooth well into 2016, I was clearly more concerned about the job it did than the speed it ran - comparative to Intel systems or in isolation.
To me, the only problem with the Intel switch was that when any of my Macs, including those I managed, needed to be replaced, I had the marginal complication of whether software compatibility would be an issue. Since Apple hadn't quite reached the point of switching MacOS every year, my own transition to Intel was barely noticeable.
I never saw Steve Jobs as anything other than a salesman, so while he was a driving influence in the business, what he had to say was nothing more than fluff. His thoughts on the PPC and then his praise of Intel were nothing more than that of a car salesman switching from a Ford dealership to a Chevy one. His job was to sell what Apple built, and he was pretty good at that, even when having to change his mind.
Right. It's not like Macs took off in popularity once they were able to boot / virtualise Windows, making them much less of a risk / compromise to buy into. Plus, you don't need to be tech obsessive to appreciate the performance improvement of a C2D over a G4 in your laptop.
That's pretty extreme, and suggests a very undemanding use case that's OK running on an ancient OS. Anyone wanting to use a computer to, e.g. surf the web, would have had a vastly better user experience with a cheap Windows 7 PC in 2016 than a 17 year old PPC Mac running Tiger or Leopard. A nice UI counts for a lot, but it's not like performance is irrelevant, unless you're extremely patient or have very light needs.
The cult-worshippers who happily do Apple's bidding without remuneration. They truly are disturbing. No matter what the circumstances, it's guaranteed that they'll perform incredible mental gymnastics to defend Apple - even when its actions are patently indefensible. They're more aggressive and zealous than Apple's own employees and they do this all for free.
I'm at my wits end with the SD card readers on my MacBooks - who on earth signed off on their design during the quality control phase as acceptably engineered? Getting the reader to recognise a card involves an arduous process of trial and error of insertion and retraction in the hope that Finder will detect it. With other manufacturers, there's none of this nonsense and their products cost a fraction of that of Apple's hardware.
As for the "buy a new Mac" advice. There's one particular individual who pops up in the Early Intel Mac forum to inform people that their computers are too old and that they should consider buying a new one - even though many of their difficulties could be solved with relatively inexpensive RAM and SSD upgrades and replacement software. That sub-forum was established to help people get the most out of older Intel Macs, not tell their owners to discard them.
Well, whereas for Apple employee's it's a paycheck, for the zealots it's emotional investment.
Suit yourself.
Read the OP original question - I've responded to that, not a years-after-the-event take on things.
I’d wager that the hype surrounding the iPhone resulted in more Mac adopters than the transition to Intel did. The portion of buyers that even knew about the possibility of running Windows on an Intel Mac must have been tiny.
Bit difficult to say, given two events occurred quite close together - the first Intel Macs were released in June 2006, and the iPhone was released in June 2007 (with both announced 6-12 months ahead of that). Personally, I waited before buying into either, with a C2D 15" MBP an iPhone 3GS respectively. Anecdotally, many people on these forums seemed to have bought an Intel Mac as their first Mac.
According to these statistics, Mac market share has been gradually rising throughout the 2000's. In this animated pie-chart based on those statistics, it shows up as a notable entry from mid-2006.
I couldn't immediately find any statistics on Boot Camp, but I'd imagine it enabled a bunch of people to get a decent 27" iMac, with the justification that it could do double duty as a gaming PC. And there were likely a fair few people who were able to use MBPs in a work environment, as they could run a Windows-only app under Parallels when necessary.
Even if someone don't wind up using either in practice, knowing that they had the option might have helped bring in new users who were on the fence. Plus, the future of the Mac was a lot more assured once it started using commodity PC parts, after the yo-yoing progress under PPC.
My Monday moment of being pedantic comes from relying on the A1138 15-inch PowerBook for considerable SL-PPC testing: it was yanked from sale as soon as a supply for the first Core Duo 2.0 15-inch MBPs were ready to ship.
Its sale-announce-to-discontinue-announce window was unusually brief: about 10 weeks, even as Apple sold it for another six weeks. That was during the month of February (the A1138’s sibling, the 17-inch A1139, another one I really wanted at the time but wouldn’t find for maaaany more years, stuck around through late April, with the one I own now being built in late March 2006).
But otherwise, yah: May 2006 was a big month for consumer Intel Macs, like the MacBook and iMac, to go on sale.
I sincerely forgot how long the window was between review of the first press prototypes and when the first ones went on sale. I remember reading David Pogue’s provisional review in The New York Times in January 2007, with Pogue still at Macworld. (A short while later, there was a follow-up video of him getting an evening with it from inside his hotel room.)
If those figures are, consistently, polled from the same source and with the same accounting methodology, it’s noteworthy to observe the down-tick in Mac usage since 2020, when it peaked during April, first full month of lockdown, at just over 12 per cent.
2020 was also the last of five consecutive years when annual average usage was over ten per cent, with every year since Silicon Macs took over being below that threshold. On a monthly basis, usage fell twice to below 8 per cent in 2023 — a share last seen July 2011 (the month Lion was released).
Thanks, but I was not specifically addressing your contributions. In fact by and large, I think a lot of what has been said here is interesting and in places, very informative. What it has also (tended) to be is very opinion-as-fact for which I have little respect, and judgmental, which isn't helpful. Not to mention rather off topic in terms of the OP's original question - which was specifically what I was trying to address.
As someone who worked inside the Apple bubble for much of the period before this transition, I do find some of the commentary quite hilarious.
Boot Camp was in Beta until October 2007 though. So, it probably wasn't a big driver of sales early on. I'd imagine though that particularly businesses must have liked to have the option to go with either OS.
Speaking of Boot Camp, I remember one Window launch, perhaps Windows 7, where Microsoft Norway (I think) used iMacs to show off the new system.
January 2006.
Nonetheless, the XOM challenge to get XP running on an Intel Mac was mastered in March 2006, and I'm speculating the Boot Camp beta being launched a few weeks later was no coincidence, i.e. Apple wanted people to XP-ise Macs “the official way”.
... or because it came with a unique-at-the-time* display that could be used with a gaming PC.
* The 27" iMac was introduced in October 2009. The 27" Cinema Display was introduced in June 2010.
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I think it's fair for folks to have felt sore with the first generation of Intel Macs as Apple unjustifiably left them behind far sooner than they had to, just like how some folks felt sore with the last generation of PPC Macs. But for their time they were – and still are – very solid and capable machines. I lived out of a 1.86 Ghz Core Duo A1181 for a couple of years and was surprised by how much I could do in terms of retro gaming thanks to Wineskin and CrossOver. In fact Lion actually was annoying in that it broke quite a few older Windows games that ran really, really well on that hardware. And with a low-end Linux distro, combined with an SSD upgrade, that Mac was amazing. I also spent a couple of months on a Core Duo MacBook Pro, and with some better thermal paste and mindful use of apps to reduce OS graphics and resource usage, I had a great experience with it.
I can certainly think of worse Macs out there. Yes, the Core Duo MacBook Pro ran hot, but I'd much rather use one of those than any of the later MacBook Pros with Nvidia or AMD GPUs that were guaranteed to fail, the later 13" MacBook Pros suffering from chronic drive cable failure, or any of the agressively locked down T2-equipped Intel Macs with that Godawful butterfly keyboard.
Which was fair for people who wanted a PowerBook G5. But for people needing to upgrade their portable setup from older G4, G3, or 603-equipped PowerBooks, the Core Duo MacBook Pros provided a very compelling performance increase, especially after Apple bumped up the clock speeds pre-sale from 1.67 Ghz / 1.86 Ghz to 1.86 Ghz / 2.0 Ghz.
I remember that in the corner of the Mac web that I hung out in at the time, there was an acute awareness that the situation for desktop PowerPC development had passed an inflection point. Freescale's public roadmap for the PowerPC post-PPC 75xx increasingly stressed embedded applications, and IBM didn't seem to be making much visible progress on improving the power consumption of the G5 for a portable computer like the PowerBook. Plus there was the public lack of progress with heat output and frequency scaling of the G5 on the desktop.
It wasn't like Apple was putting out the Snail/Toasted Bunny/Steamroller ads one day, and then announcing the Intel switch the next. Rewatching WWDC 2004 - a year before the WWDC 2005 announcement of the x86 switch - it was amusing to see Steve trying to put a brave face on the vapourware 3 Ghz Power Mac G5, practically reducing the Dual 2.5 Ghz Power Mac G5 to a brief footnote compared to the aluminum Cinema Displays. The best he could do to poke at Intel was say, "Yeah, we're not at 3 Ghz, but well, the whole semiconductor industry sucked when we went to 90 nm, and look! IBM and the G5's scaling sucked less than Intel and the P4's scaling!"
While the G4-G5 era had lot of bright points, there were many disappointments with respect to frequency scaling and efficiency improvements that left Apple coming up with excuses and/or makeshift technical moves (with albeit some technical merits) to make up for the G4 and G5's shortcomings.
That's not to say that the G4 or G5 were terrible, or that the computers that used them were terrible (the post-Intel announcement DLSD PowerBook G4 and the Quad 2.5 Ghz Power Mac G5 were awesome machines). But it was becoming increasingly clear to people beyond the rumor chasers that long-term PPC development was not putting Apple in an ideal place.
Anyway, just to make it sound like I'm not a blind Apple apologist, let me give Apple a hearty f**k you for their utterly garbage pricing tiers with the M1 and M2 MacBook Air. My advice to folks who (regrettably) have their heart set on a new MacBook is to just get a refurb base model M1/M2 Air and not give Apple a penny more.
Needless shortcomings and corner-cutting at the design stage and the need to rush the products out were largely responsible for this state of affairs. For example:
A consequence of Apple needing to rush things out. They could've waited a few months and released the first generation of Intel Macs with 64 bit CPU's and EFI's. The Core Solo and Core Duo Macs are restricted to Snow Leopard and when Apple jumped ship to Intel, they had to have already determined that the long-term roadmap was a 64 bit OS but they short-changed the consumers who supported them by purchasing the first generation of Intel Macs that were frankly compromised and in some ways, stop-gap offerings.
Yes. My 2006 MBP coped ok with the temperatures of Northern Europe but when I lived in the tropics, the overheating was a nightmare. It was so bad that you could probably cook food on the laptop and that hastened the GPU's demise. I'll return to this later.
An absolutely mind-boggling decision to cripple the Mac Pro 1,1 with a 32 bit EFI that officially restricted its upgrade path to Lion. Workarounds are required if you want to get 64 bit versions of Windows and Linux to run on those machines. Who within Apple thought that this was a good decision?
Owners of these machines - which includes me - certainly don't. The community has provided measures that allow the first-gen Mac Pro to run macOS releases as far as El Capitan, which is an indication of the potential and longevity that the machines should've been able to achieve by default had Apple either gone with a 64 bit EFI as standard or as you pointed out, provided an update to patch/upgrade the 32 bit one. A gesture that would've created tremendous goodwill and cost a pittance to develop and deploy.
Imagine how many people retired or dumped their Mac Pro's because they were unawares that they could be taken beyond Lion with a bit of finessing?
You won't be surprised to learn that I'm in full agreement on this but don't forget that earlier iterations of the Core Duo MBP also suffered from GPU problems - it's just that they were far less publcised than the Nvidia and AMD debacles. The original logic board in my 2006 MBP was affected by GPU failure - which very likely wasn't helped by the local climate exacerbating the overheating defeciency but I got lucky and found a later revision on eBay that was cheap and not known to suffer from the issue and also had the benefit of a faster CPU.
Again, Microsoft came knocking at IBM's door and this saw Apple relegated to a lesser priority.
The following quote is taken from a blistering critique of Microsoft's history that was written in 2004 and updated to include Apple's switch to Intel CPUs.
In this clip, IBM can be analogised as the piano teacher, Microsoft as Phil Connors and Apple as the ousted student.
Yes, the most effective way to make corporations sit up and take notice is to hit them where it hurts the most - their pockets - by depriving them of revenue. Unfortunately there are not enough of us who are inclined to take such a stance.
The is is the only way really IMO. Governments are relegated to their jurisdictions. If I dont like your bad business policies, I just go somewhere else with better ones. Customers pocket books exactly because we are everywhere across all major currencies are the real hammers that incluence businesses trajectory.
The story I read was one of Apple’s techs was running MacOS on an intel processor as an experiment.
When Steve saw it he was impressed and I believe flew to Japan to talk to Sony about building intel laptops.
Who knows how decisions are made in Apple today. Tim doesn’t strike me as the visionary.
This isn’t the case.
OS X was derived directly from NeXTstep/OpenStep, which in OpenStep form was designed to run on a wide variety of processors, including Sun’s SPARC stations, HP’s PA-RISC processors, as well as Intel CPUs, and PowerPC CPUs. This would have been 32-bit-only for all platforms on which OpenStep could run.
It is established Apple, once NeXT was absorbed by Apple, adopted the mach microkernel and BSD-based NeXT architecture to replace Mac OS (as Apple’s pre-NeXT efforts kept hitting dead-end issues, nearly sinking the company). This means Apple were able, from day one, to test their ongoing transition of OpenStep into what would then become Rhapsody; into what would then become Mac OS X Server 1.0; and into what would then become Mac OS X (now known as macOS).
It was less an experiment and more an internal parity testing of each major OS X version on both Intel and PPC processors until Apple were ready to announce OS X compatibility with Intel processors as the next… step in OS X. Incidentally, 64-bit binaries only began to appear within OS X with Tiger, which went on sale maybe six weeks before Jobs announced the Intel transition in June 2005. Even though the G5 was a 64-bit system, OS X was never optimized for 64-bit PPC hardware.
Sony never built Apple’s New World PowerPC or Intel-era laptops. Many were assembled by Foxconn and Tech Com/Quanta Computer (many of Apple’s products have relied on Quanta over the decades).
See Table 1 on this wikipost. The closest Sony got involved with Apple’s laptops was in producing iBook G4 batteries and the rare Sony optical drive showing up in Macs, as much were supplied by Matushita (Panasonic), LG, and Benq.
As I wrote not long ago, Cook’s chief contribution to the Apple brand is his “premiumizing” of it, turning its products into a luxury marque. Cook has done things an MBA, as he is, does to increase shareholder exchange-value in Apple.
Jobs was a salesman. That’s how the two differ at their core.
Maybe I've had one too many...it's Saturday night and Belgian Ale is very good... but I'm writing this on a G5. Also on my desk is a 2006 Core Duo iMac. I acquired the G5 two years ago and it's become my daily driver. I've had the iMac since 2006, and have used it off and on since then. Maybe there's a benchmark out there where the Intel-iMac is faster than the G5. But having used both machines side-by-side, the G5 is without question the faster machine for almost everything. Maybe it's the fact that my G5 has 16 GB of RAM and an Radeon X1900, and the iMac is limited at 2GB RAM and has a basic laptop graphics card.
If a cheap iMac 1st-Gen CoreDuo iMac offered better performance than a late-model G5, then maybe I would have felt "hoodwinked" by the switch back then. But at the time I didn't. I was excited that Apple was going to be able to build better systems, and we'd have native Windows support, i.e. games!!! Apple provided software updates to 10.5 Leopard until August 2009, and you could run a modern web browser on 10.5 for many years after that. So if you bought a G5 Powermac or iMac in late 2005, IMHO. you would have had a perfectly usable computer until at least late 2009, and probably well into the first half of the 2010s.
Honestly I feel far more screwed by Apple's recent switch to ARM, than the switch to PPC back in '06. Not because it obsoletes my Intel hardware, it was already well past its prime. But because Apple has taken away any future upgrade possibilities, and has adopted a very anti-consumer RAM and SSD pricing strategy.
If a cheap iMac 1st-Gen CoreDuo iMac offered better performance than a late-model G5, then maybe I would have felt "hoodwinked" by the switch back then. But at the time I didn't. I was excited that Apple was going to be able to build better systems, and we'd have native Windows support, i.e. games!!! Apple provided software updates to 10.5 Leopard until August 2009, and you could run a modern web browser on 10.5 for many years after that. So if you bought a G5 Powermac or iMac in late 2005, IMHO. you would have had a perfectly usable computer until at least late 2009, and probably well into the first half of the 2010s.
Honestly I feel far more screwed by Apple's recent switch to ARM, than the switch to PPC back in '06. Not because it obsoletes my Intel hardware, it was already well past its prime. But because Apple has taken away any future upgrade possibilities, and has adopted a very anti-consumer RAM and SSD pricing strategy.