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.
Apple moved from the 68K to PowerPC and, from there, to x86. Many companies did such moves before: HP from 68K to PA-RISC, Sun, from 68K to SPARC and IBM from the proprietary AS/400 to POWER. All these migrations were very successful.
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?
I think it went a little more smoothly than the Motorola 680x0 -> PowerPC transition. Notice the ppc and i386 directories that were in Mac OS X from the get go.
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)
Apple has a long history of doing this, though. The PPC-X86 was actually the second processor migration of the Mac. The first was in the early 90s when Apple moved from the Motorola 68K series to the PPC.
In the x86 transition, Apple was discarding the previous effort which had been required to move from 680x0 to PowerPC, and that seems to have been the correct choice.
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.
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.
2006 wasn't the first such transition Apple did, just the previous one. Their transitions from 68k to PPC and from classic MacOS to OS X were similar to the PPC to x86 and x86 to ARM transitions from an application compatibility standpoint.
Apple moved from 68k to PPC, and then to Intel. Binary transitions like those are not new, and are made easier by an OS that is architecture agnostic from very early on.
Apple has never pulled off a transition like this before. None of your examples involved going from a popular architecture with broad software support to a less-popular architecture.
Transitioning to x86 brought additional customers who prefer Mac but also need to run Windows or Linux or who do x86 development. Transitioning away from it may lose them.
There was also the 68K transition to PowerPC a long time ago. And more recently, the 32-bit to 64-bit transition.
And for a lot of the older Mac developers, iOS was kind of like another migration. And iOS has gone from armv6 to armv7 to arm64, plus the x86 and x86-64 simulator targets. Not to mention that there is now an LLVM Bitcode requirement for Apple TV and watchOS.
Apple and its developer community has a lot of experience with architecture migration. Each transition built on the experience of the previous and got smoother each time. Apple has been very good insulating their frameworks and tools from the architecture, and the Apple developer community has gotten very good at following Apple's guidelines to minimize disruption since there have been so many of these transitions.
Apple transitions CPU architectures every 10-15 years.
6502 -> 68k in 1984 via hard-cutover [edit: see cestith's reply, there's more to this story than I knew]
68k -> PPC in 1994 via emulation
PPC -> x86 in 2006 via Rosetta JIT translation
x86 -> ARM in 2020 via Rosetta 2 static recompilation
You could even argue the transition from Mac OS 9 to Mac OS X was a transition of similar magnitude (although solely on PowerPC processors), with Classic Environment running a full Mac OS 9 instance [1]
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.
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