In general, IBM was just going in a different direction with Power than Apple needed them to be going in. IBM was and is focused on the highest end, high priced end of the server market.
That had basically nothing to do with the architecture. The key reason was likely the diverging requirements between laptop (Apple) and server (IBM) chips.
It's interesting to me that Apple and IBM took opposite approaches during that time, and neither one worked out great in the long term for them. IBM's architecture was a runaway success, but the company itself was sidelined just like Apple was.
One wonders what a winning strategy for an original hardware developer would have looked like, in that arena.
Well, certainly I think a part of it was that they could unify on one Chip with the rest of the industry did provide some economies of scale advantages, though rumor has it that Apple has always paid a little bit more for its chips so they could guarantee certain things and dictate as such.
I believe the main driver though, as pointed out in this CNET article https://www.cnet.com/news/four-years-later-why-did-apple-dro... was that IBM could not deliver on a powerful enough powerpc chip that would also meet the other constraints, namely, at this time, one of the biggest markets Apple had was the notebook market, and its sales there were exploding. IBM was unable to deliver a lower thermal envelope for its portable chipsets on top of performance issues.
I think this more than anything else pushed that reality.
The switch from 68k to PowerPC was because 68k was dead, Motorola was pushing the 88k which was already failing in the market, and while Apple also considered other architectures like SPARC, they didn't want to be tied to only a single company's fortunes again like they were with the 68k.
So when IBM came to them asking "hey how about we scale down POWER to a desktop chip for you?" Apple also brought in Motorola so that they could dual-source their chips and not be dependent on one company, and PowerPC was born. Rather than being an up-and-coming competitor, PowerPC probably wouldn't exist without Apple's involvement (they would probably still have pursued a scaled-down POWER, but it wouldn't be PowerPC)
There wasn't an issue at all with keeping up with performance. The problem was that IBM was pushing PowerPC more and more into the server space and Apple needed a roadmap that factored in laptops.
I think the comparison fails to recognize that Apple design their systems for specific workloads and user profiles. Apple has long abandoned the server market.
I don't think the IBM PC pushed Apple out of enterprise sales. Apple didn't want to go into those places.
Steve Jobs was fired by the board of directors at Apple because (among other things) was going to screw up any corporate deals that Apple might wish to pursue.
I haven't any direct evidence, but I managed a medium sized corporate network of Macintosh computers in early 1990s. Their attempts at telling a coherent story for business systems was a bit of reality distortion field, Sculley-style. Ironically, their network server play was a partnership with IBM, rebadged RS/6000 crates.
So hmm, maybe sufficiently counter factual to play in this alternate reality -- but I think it would be more likely in business systems to see network of workstations from Sun or Apollo take some wins. DEC VAX servers, oh boy!
PowerPC essentially died as a desktop and server processor once Apple decided to go Intel. IBM decided to go back towards Power's roots with the POWER5 (the follow-on to the PPC970 in the Power Mac G5 and the PowerPC-based XServes).
It doesn't really make sense. Apple was offering a competing hardware/software product to the IBM PC -- they were not writing software for IBM PCs as an alternative to MS-DOS.
I lost interest in Apple over a decade ago. Too many restrictions, and overpriced hardware. Plus, they've never once made a serious play in the server space (nobody uses OSX Server unless they really have to).
From what I recall at the time Apple (as well as others) tended to do things to keep M$ OSs off their hardware and differentiate themselves from IBM so they would have more control of the platform and sell boxes. M$ goal was to be the dominate OS then. IBM misguidedly chose to make money on hardware. They were too accustom to getting exorbitant amounts for their software ie leasing it.
It was not so easy to port an OS back then and IBM PCs were the dominate species so too was DOS then Windows. Zilog was starting to fade also - the Z8000 never caught on. Apple became the only company keeping the 68000 alive. Motorola was not up to the challenge of competing with Intel or Apple was not making enough volume to make it worth their effort. Apple - fighting the last war - thought IBM was their competitor so eschewed any compatibility with IBM PCs and chose to go it alone. It wasn't until later (after Jobs return) that they realized they were wrong and things had moved on. Reasons for choosing a CPU where more about power and speed.
The bigger issue was that they couldn’t get the G5 to work in a laptop and this was killing Apple. Apple’s laptops have always been a cut above their PC counterparts in terms of design, but in those days it felt like Apple Laptops were from a different planet, except they were unreasonably slow in large part because they were stuck on the G4 processor for years. Switching to intel was a necessity for survival. IBM just couldn’t deliver or keep up with what Intel was doing.
Well, that guy was right to be worried. Apple made extremely successful consumer products, but where are their servers?
You could rightly argue that it's better for apple to focus on other stuff than servers, but it most definitely wasn't better for the people who depended on their server hardware and software.
Actually it seems strange now, but back in the 90s Apple (and NeXT too) were very focused on the enterprise. They were just "lucky" to have done badly at it. In fact they actually even made servers: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_Network_Server
Yeah I remember Xserve! But if anything it seems like it was evidence that Apple wasn't really able to "get" the server market, where hardware is a commodity and price and compatibility are basically the only concern. Not to say that couldn't change, especially if their own processors had a big advantage in price/performance, but there hasn't been a whole lot of evidence that they have what it takes to succeed in this space.
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