Intel Macs: Am I wrong for missing PPC?

Any particular reason other than nostalgia?

Agreed. Although the Intel Macs are super-duper fast and you can run Windows (which I've just done on my dad's MB, and it's not nice), I do kinda miss PPC Macs. They just felt more 'special' than the Intel ones.

Agreed. Plus every bit of the development was pretty much focused on Apple, whereas Intel could give a crap about us "special needs" kids. I've been 3 weeks with my MBP now, and the fact that it only sleeps when it wants to still gets my goat.

However, I speed is craziness, and I feel like a louse for trying to convince my brother that a 1.33PPC with OS X could beat a 2.0 Intel anyday...

Apple has a very close relationship with Intel, so the previous comments are way of beam.

Intel worked **very** hard with Apple to get the whole line of computers over to their platform so quickly.

I still use PPC and am therefore better than anyone who doesn't. I rate that.

I like my Intel iMac's speed but....my PPC Mac Mini was much more stable. Mind you, I think it's an OSX problem which will eventually settle down. The 10.4.10 update was a step back for my iMac's sound system...

What I don't miss about the PPC Mac time is the "waiting for G5 PowerBook" nonsense.

Papajohn56 said:

I guess it's part nostalgia, but also, we were different, and the PPC Macs retained value much better. There was something just special.

We still have a PPC iMac and a 68040 Quadra, so it's not lost, but I loved PPC Apple. I don't want Windows on my Mac. Windows software yes, but I guarantee I am not installing windows on my intel Mac. I'd rather use VMWare and never have to introduce that terrible OS to my Mac.

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I hate to say this to you but even with VMware you will still need to install a copy of Windows.

what i don't miss about the ppc days was the uncertainty of updates. what will the next update bring? will the g5 ever come? and when it did, we wondered when/if g5 powerbooks would come? also, g4 updates were so incremental; look at the powerbook g4 releases. we saw speeds of 400 mhz and 500, 667, 800, 1 ghz, 1.25, 1.5 and finally 1.67 ghz releases. the g5 never came to laptops, and we never crossed the 2 ghz barrier. arguing the megahertz myth became increasingly futile with faster and more capable pcs. intel chips breathed new life into the mac laptop line, and i'm not ever looking back. i'm glad we don't use ppc. i'm glad our computer specs are largely the same as the pc world. what differentiates our computers from pcs is largely the os, and i think we have windows beat.

siurpeeman said:

what i don't miss about the ppc days was the uncertainty of updates. what will the next update bring? will the g5 ever come? and when it did, we wondered when/if g5 powerbooks would come? also, g4 updates were so incremental; look at the powerbook g4 releases. we saw speeds of 400 mhz and 500, 667, 800, 1 ghz, 1.25, 1.5 and finally 1.67 ghz releases. the g5 never came to laptops, and we never crossed the 2 ghz barrier. arguing the megahertz myth became increasingly futile with faster and more capable pcs. intel chips breathed new life into the mac laptop line, and i'm not ever looking back. i'm glad we don't use ppc. i'm glad our computer specs are largely the same as the pc world. what differentiates our computers from pcs is largely the os, and i think we have windows beat.

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G5's got to 2.7...

ziwi said:

G5's got to 2.7...

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i was referring to the g4 processor, ppc laptops in particular.

My MacBook Pro blows away any PPC computer I've ever used. I'm glad Apple switched to Intel, and I don't miss the PPC one little bit.

...well, maybe just a tiny bit.

I have a PowerPC Mac and an Intel Mac (as well as a Hackintosh for that matter). I love my PPC Mac the most. Maybe because I was born and raised on an IBM RS/6000 with a PowerPC processor. Who knows

heatasmallhouse said:

Agreed. Plus every bit of the development was pretty much focused on Apple, whereas Intel could give a crap about us "special needs" kids.

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I'd say you're wrong there. IBM never delivered a PowerPC G5 chip that was capable of working in a laptop because of heat and power issues. We would have been stuck with G4 forever in the notebook space. And I barely even want to mention the 3 Ghz G5 that never showed up...

The G4 was a great chip in it's day, let's not forget that. If Motorola hadn't been so slack we would still be PPC. The last G4 laptops are still very good machines with fantastic battery life.

Desktop CPU development costs billions and billions of dollars. PowerPC is not the first CPU architecture to fall victim to Intel's bottomless pockets. Alpha, MIPS, PA-RISC were all abandoned in desktop/server applications and SPARC is fighting a losing battle. It's just too expensive to keep these architectures alive - much cheaper to join 'em than to try and beat 'em. You can buy old SGI systems on eBay that used to cost $20,000 and know that you've got a formerly awesome R10000 CPU under the hood and it's great and makes you feel warm and tingly until you try to perform some kind of CPU-intensive task and realize that it's slow as piss by today's standards. Technology has moved on, PPC Macs are yesterday. If it makes you feel better, keep using them, more power to you.

Apple was lucky it had the development partner it did in IBM. The 970 was an amazing chip for its time and experienced a brief success against an Intel wandering in the wilderness of the gigahertz wars in 2003-04. But once Intel woke up and started aiming for efficiency and low power consumption instead of just big gigahertz numbers, Apple pretty much had no choice but to leave PowerPC or else continue on with the "0.16GHz upgrades of an aging architecture every 12 months" nonsense that it had been putting up with since 1999.

I think it would have been interesting to see what would have happened if the PPC roadmap had more focus on creating a chip more suitable for a notebook computer.

The only thing that makes me nervous about the Intel transition is that we aren't seeing the same advances in hardware design that came with the movement from g4 to g5 for example.

It seems the only place we're seeing radical hardware out of apple these days is with the recent iphone and to a lesser extent the ipod line up.

I guess alot of nostalgia is coming from the fact that in the PPC days processor changes where a much bigger thing going from the G3 to the G4 and the G4 to the G5 were major events worthy of keynote announcements.
We saw the imac evolve from the CRT display to the sleek LCD form we have now.
The powerbook went from black to titanium to the Aluminum.

But when we went from core duo to core 2 duo it was about as big as watching the G4 powerbook go from 1 ghz to 1.33ghz or 1.5 or whatever it got up to at the time.

In a way, PPC did make Apple more "special" and "different" than the rest. It still is by design and OS, but hardware wise it's more mainstream. However, i don't miss the PPC days. I have considered getting a mac during the PPC days, but never got through with it. I don't know if i would've switched if Apple didn't go Intel. I bet many people wouldn't have switched if Apple stayed with PPC. Their 1.67 ghz chip may be faster than Intel's 2.0 ghz, but to an average consumer, 1.67 is 1.67 and 2.0 is faster than 1.67. Another advantage of the Intel switch is lower prices, which is another incentive for people to buy. Apple no longer mean premium prices. It certainly pushed me to get my macbook

Will_reed said:

I think it would have been interesting to see what would have happened if the PPC roadmap had more focus on creating a chip more suitable for a notebook computer.

The only thing that makes me nervous about the Intel transition is that we aren't seeing the same advances in hardware design that came with the movement from g4 to g5 for example.

It seems the only place we're seeing radical hardware out of apple these days is with the recent iphone and to a lesser extent the ipod line up.

I guess alot of nostalgia is coming from the fact that in the PPC days processor changes where a much bigger thing going from the G3 to the G4 and the G4 to the G5 were major events worthy of keynote announcements.
We saw the imac evolve from the CRT display to the sleek LCD form we have now.
The powerbook went from black to titanium to the Aluminum.

But when we went from core duo to core 2 duo it was about as big as watching the G4 powerbook go from 1 ghz to 1.33ghz or 1.5 or whatever it got up to at the time.

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I think the first generation of Intel-Apple hardware looked the same as the previous PPC generation jsut so that Apple could establish the market. If they had come out with totally new enclosures some people would not take kindly to a completely new apple image. They had to sift into the market slowly.

As Steve Jobs said at that little speech thing he had earlier, he said that we should all watch for new and exciting products from apple in the next year to come. I'm sure We'll see some new nice looking hardware. Apple would surely never keep the same looking stuff for that long.

Remember, going from Core Duo to Core 2 Duo was very similar from going from one G4 chip to the next. It's just the name that stayed the same. Believe it or not with [almost] every new PPC mac launch there was some sort of new update to the processor line. We just see it more prominently with Intel hardware as it's more accessible by everyone as it's not unique like PPC architecture was.

I had some vague paranoia that post-Intel, the idea of a 'Mac' would die. It'd just, underneath, be a PC with Mac OS X. I imagined a quick slippery slope where Mac OS X became some BeOS-like curiosity running on grey boxes that would slowly die off as no one would see much point in serious development.

I was wrong - Intel Macs feel just as much like Macs and PPC ones and the clamour for 'Mac OS X on generic PC' seems to have died down. Apple are still the hardware-software integration specialists they always were and life has continued happily.

Ultimately, Mac OS X is so darned nice that Apple can be Intel and let you run Windows on Apple boxes without any fear whatsoever. That's a triumph of innovation over mere market dominance.