This might be too little, too late. They should do what they did with the Intel transition; start selling PCs which can run Mac OS X as an interim measure.
Why might they not do this?
a) makes them look bad
b) well... is there a CPU architecture transition coming up? Last time there was this performance block, it was time to move from PowerPC.
While it's definitely bad that Apple stopped supporting PowerPC Macs just 3 years after they sold the last machines, expecting any support at all 10 years later is ridiculous.
What ties people to PowerPC these days? Surely the speed and power consumption of the latest Intel machines is 100x better?
Meanwhile, Apple has gone through two deprecations of CPU architectures: first PowerPC and then Intel. Macs are nice, but I wish they had the same commitment to backwards compatibility.
My personal thought - there's a hell of a lot more software written for x86 Mac than there ever was for PowerPC Macs. It would make sense to provide the transational layer for a longer amount of time.
That said, Apple has never been shy about aggressive transitions.
I purchased one of the first Macs that ran on a PowerPC processor and I was profoundly disappointed. Performance was no better than a 68040-based Mac and it was pretty crashy. As time went on and software was updated that machine became less crashy but performace was always poor.
I don't have any insider information, but I wouldn't be surprised if Apple felt like they needed a backup plan in case the PowerPC alliance was unsuccessful at matching the speed growth of Intel's products. I'd say the G3 was the first PowerPC CPU that impressed me, I think Apple only stuck with PowerPC for two more generations (the G5).
To be fair, the original OS X was pretty backwards compatible--they ran OS 9 stuff in a virtual environment much like Windows 7 runs its older stuff. The Intel transition is the first time that Apple has been so lax about backwards compatibility. They dropped Classic on Intel Macs and they're about to drop PowerPC compatibility. It's a shame--I have OS 9 Games I would love to run on my MacBook Pro. Not to mention all the old programs I wrote.
It would be more like the OS 9 -> OS X switch happening at the same time as the PPC -> Intel transition, but without the old CPU architecture being totally deprecated.
Apple's notable for having made 3 major transitions (68k to PPC, MacOS to OS X, and PPC to Intel), but all three of those were as minimal as they could be given the circumstances. The architecture transitions were made with almost completely transparent binary compatibility and minimal changes needed for source code, while the source-incompatible OS/API change was made as gradual as possible with a long grace period (which a few companies chose to exploit rather than update their apps before it was too late).
Windows as a system is clearly not clean enough at the moment to easily switch architectures without needing a lot of complex compatibility stuff thrown in. If they try to force developers off old APIs and introduce a new architecture, that new architecture will be a second class citizen and will need a lot of external factors to give it traction.
My experience with the PPC transition was definitely not that. A 2004 PowerMac G5 lost basically all software support and required community involvement (the likes of tenfourfox) to even get a competent browser by around 2010. Snow Leopard released in 2009 and didn't support PPC Macs.
That said, I think the Intel transition will likely be slower. Apple has said they plan to keep releasing Intel Mac's and there's certain things (discrete GPU support?) that might motivate them to do so.
That and upgrade cycles on desktops/laptops have also slowed quite a bit in the last 15 years.
The conversation started by the linked article is clearly suggesting it can change Broadway when software is recompiled to run natively with Apple Silicon, though, and this is a perfectly reasonable take. An M1-based Mac mini that's actually less expensive than the Intel one it directly replaced can be a lot faster.
The arguments in the thread about "but a lot of software right now runs in emulation" and "who knows when the software companies will get around to transitioning" aren't wrong, per se, but they're also arguments that long-time Apple users have heard variants of in the PowerPC to x86 transition. And in the (original) Mac OS to OS X transition. And in the 68K to PowerPC transition. It turns out that when transitioning your software to the new platform doubles your performance and/or is necessary to keep selling your product, you have a fairly strong motivation to do the work.
If PowerPC is such a great architecture, then why did Apple transition the Mac platform to x86 about 12 years ago? Has PowerPC gotten much better since then?
Plus I would like to remind people that there were points where PowerPC Macs were extremely impressive, and that didn't magically reorder the world because existing software and OS ecosystems mean a hell of a lot more than just straight performance.
I hope for Apple users this wil not be the disaster that the switch from Motorola to the PowerPC was. Back then, this is what turned me away from the Mac platform I used to love.
Why might they not do this?
a) makes them look bad
b) well... is there a CPU architecture transition coming up? Last time there was this performance block, it was time to move from PowerPC.
reply