My recollection is that the PPC at launch was much faster than x86. Jobs talked about the road map a bit, and there was a lot of press about it too, but the road map didn’t pan out, and their partners dropped the ball. And many other companies made the transition to x86 (Data General was one I worked with) and subsequently died.
The biggest problem was Motorola/Freescale saw that their future was in embedded, not the (relative) high performance required for personal computing. So the chip provider for Apple's mobile lineup no longer was producing performant chips. Unfortunately, IBM's implementation of PPC led a dual life as a server/workstation and desktop chip meant that getting it's power consumption, heat profile and performance optimized for a mobile device was an extremely difficult proposition.
It would be interesting to see where we'd be if IBM had ensured Apple they could deliver a G5 laptop and had done so at a price and spec competitive with, or superior to, Intel.
> The biggest problem was Motorola/Freescale saw that their future was in embedded, not the (relative) high performance required for personal computing.
Ironically that's also the niche where PowerPC ended up when Apple dumped them :)
Yeah. The 601 was on par with the P54s and the 604/604e were a bit ahead of the Pentium Pro and Pentium II of the era. The G4 vs P3 and P4 is when the problems for Motorola and IBM eventually ran out of steam with the G5.
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