It didn't work out because Apple didn't have the in-house talent to pull it off. They had to rely on IBM and Motorola to do the actual chip design, while Apple focussed on creating the software for these chips. IBM and Motorola started to lose interest in promoting PowerPC in anything but the embedded space and server markets.
This time around, Apple has brought all the talent they need to do all of the design in-house. No more design-by-committee. We're dealing with Steve Jobs after all ;)
Apple didn't adopt PowerPC after fighting with Motorola and it was no shock to Motorola, or the world. Motorola and Apple and IBM worked together on PowerPC in a consortium, after the Motorola 88000 RISC (which Apple also tried) failed for various reasons.
This was all in the exiled-Jobs years while Apple was thrashing about trying to build a real operating system (or systems) to replace classic Mac OS. (NeXT also played with the m88k.)
And ARM wasn't new to Apple with the iOS systems, either. The Newton was built around ARM back in the 90s.
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)
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.
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.
PowerPC really died in 1997-98 when it became clear that Jobs wasn't going to license Mac OS (classic or X) for 3rd party PowerPC boxes anymore, and Windows NT on PPC wasn't going anywhere.
Without an operating system, IBM and Motorola didn't have an incentive to build PC chips anymore. The G4 happened because it was already in development and the vector extensions were useful for Motorola's embedded ambitions. The G5 happened because Apple basically paid IBM to make a desktop chip out of their POWER designs, AFAIK.
Around 2004, there was a startup PowerPC maker called P.A. Semi [1] that apparently competed for Apple's Mac CPU business. After Apple went Intel, they acquired P.A. Semi to design iPhone chips instead.
Those weren't really so much clones as Macs in non-Apple cases and assembled in non-Apple factories. The licensed clone makers had to use Apple-approved motherboard designs, and Apple would not approve designs other than those that were very similar to Apple's.
Power Computing demonstrated prototypes that would take the Mac into new markets that Apple's designs didn't fit well in, and publicly begged Apple to allow them to sell them, but Apple refused.
The result was that the pseudo-clones competed directly for the same customers Apple was going for, and so of course the program was a failure. A successful authorized clone program needs to grow the market, not merely redistribute it.
I loved the PowerPC chips, the 604 and G5 in particular. Too bad it never became a viable platform outside of Apple.
(In the '90s, the PowerPC had very competitive price/performance, but there wasn't a viable desktop OS available after Apple terminated the original MacOS clone program. 5-10 years later Linux would have been much more ready, but the chips were not competitive with Intel anymore.)
But they had to do _something_, staying on the 68k wasn’t an option. It couldn’t compete with the Pentium and Motorola had effectively abandoned the series, focusing their efforts on the PowerPC.
Apple made a lot of bad decisions in the 90s, but I don’t see how the switch to PPC was one of them.
At least PowerPC machines were available for reasonable prices from Apple for about a decade - and Linux was quite well supported in addition to OS X. But with Motorola’s loss of interest in the PC and server market and IBM’s focus on processors for consoles, there was no future for Apple in the growing mobile market. After all, we’re still waiting for the G5 Powerbook :).
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.
Actually, Apple transitioned from Motorola 68k to PowerPC in the mid-90s and the 2000s transition from PowerPC to x86 was their second successful transition.
I have the pleasure of working with PowerPC in my day job. Also a relatively clean architecture. I really do wish that Apple had been more successful with it, that Microsoft would have continued supporting it in NT, that Motorola / IBM had kept up with Intel in raw performance, and that it had a larger user base than it does today.
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).
At the time Apple was licensing MacOS to clone manufacturers like Power Computing. It's likely they thought the only way to grow the clone business was to open the floodgates to Intel PC clone manufacturers.
Of course the NeXT merger brought back Steve Jobs who killed the clone program immediately.
It was a failure because the thermal characteristics made it extremely difficult to expand. They’re not going to market something that is essentially an Apple-branded hackintosh devoid of custom components.
When my wife worked at Apple Canada we got to borrow a G5 tower from the company demo pool for a bit. Noisiest and hottest computer I've ever worked with. In the summer I could have the AC on full blast and the room I was in with it would be hot. And in the winter it was an effective space heater. And a super noisy fan.
PowerPC always sounded good on paper. But it was definitely a dead end for Apple.
Some rump stump of the Amiga community seems obsessed with PowerPC still for some reason.
It is nice to imagine an alternative timeline in which Apple pivoted directly to ARM instead of to x86 when the switch happened. It was only a couple or three years after the Intel switch that the iPhone came out.
This time around, Apple has brought all the talent they need to do all of the design in-house. No more design-by-committee. We're dealing with Steve Jobs after all ;)
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