A Bit of History Behind the Mac OS X on Intel Project "Marklar"

[MacRumors]

Apple's announcement to move their Macs from PowerPC to Intel processors in 2005 was a huge surprise at the time. Serious reports about the plan hit the web only two days before the official announcement at WWDC 2005. The immediate reaction on MacRumors included a 2936 comment thread with some very strong reactions to the switch-up.

Now, a post by the wife of a former Apple employee at Q&A site Quora fills in some fascinating details about the Mac OS X on Intel project.

According to Kim Scheinberg, she and her husband John Kullmann had decided to move back to the east coast in 2000. In order to make the move, Kullmann had to work on a more independent project at Apple. Ultimately, he started work on an Intel version of Mac OS X. Eighteen months later, in December 2001, his boss asks him to show him what he's been working on:

At this point, JK has three PCs in his office at Apple, and another three in the office at home, all sold to him by a friend who sells custom built PCs (can't order them through the usual Apple channels because no one in the company knows what he's working on). All are running the Mac OS.

In JK's office, Joe watches in amazement as JK boots up an Intel PC and up on the screen comes the familiar 'Welcome to Macintosh'.

Joe pauses, silent for a moment, then says, "I'll be right back."

He comes back a few minutes later with Bertrand Serlet.

Max (our 1-year-old) and I were in the office when this happened because I was picking JK up from work. Bertrand walks in, watches the PC boot up, and says to JK, "How long would it take you to get this running on a (Sony) Vaio?" JK replies, "Not long" and Bertrand says, "Two weeks? Three?"

JK said more like two *hours*. Three hours, tops.

Bertrand tells JK to go to Fry's (the famous West Coast computer chain) and buy the top of the line, most expensive Vaio they have. So off JK, Max and I go to Frys. We return to Apple less than an hour later. By 7:30 that evening, the Vaio is running the Mac OS. [My husband disputes my memory of this and says that Matt Watson bought the Vaio. Maybe Matt will chime in.]

The next morning, Steve Jobs is on a plane to Japan to meet with the President of Sony.

More engineers were assigned in 2002, and she says that's about when rumors of the project started to appear.

Indeed, in August 2002, we reported on the first news report about Marklar from eWeek:

According to sources, the Cupertino, Calif., Mac maker has been working steadily on maintaining current, PC-compatible builds of its Unix-based OS.

At the time, it was described as a "fall-back plan", in case the PowerPC should fail to deliver. Later, reports would also claim that PC manufacturers were wooing Steve Jobs to allow them to license Mac OS X and sell PCs running Apple's operating system.

Ultimately, Apple decided to transition from the PowerPC to Intel processor in 2005. The transition was a success, and all Macs now run on Intel processors.

Article Link: A Bit of History Behind the Mac OS X on Intel Project "Marklar"

 

[macnerd93]

I love the second comment on the 2005 thread LOL

"Expect Mac sales to tank in the next 1-2 years though..."

xD

 

[WatchTheThrone]

Pretty cool story I must say.
It was only a matter of time before they went to intel. Intel is now the industry standard processor so it was a very smart move to do it then!!
But wasn't ppc wayyyy faster than intel or am I wrong??

 

[Nermal]

The next morning, Steve Jobs is on a plane to Japan to meet with the President of Sony.

I wonder whether this means that Steve was considering licensing out OS X.

 

[macnerd93]

But wasn't ppc wayyyy faster than intel or am I wrong??

At the time PPC was way faster even though in some cases the PowerPC cpu maybe a few hundred MHz slower. Most revision of the Power Mac range generally won title of fastest computer that a consumer could actually purchase. It was to do with the way the CPU pipelines were structured, a shorter pipeline= greater speed and performance. From what I remember a 1Ghz iMac G4 was the pentium equivalent at the time of about a 1.6-1.8 GHz Intel Pentium 4. The fact that Apple had control (and still have control) of both hardware and software also drastically helped performance too.

 

[antonis]

IBM can blame themselves for losing a big partner like Apple on this. They failed to deliver a G5 (or any processor faster than Motorolla's G4) for the laptop series. Apple laptops were stuck with aged and underpowered G4 for a long time waiting for IBM to deliver something new. Apple had to move on eventually, or lose the laptop market entirely.

I'm not glad to say this, though. PowerPC processors seemed to have a better architecture, leading to a great performance on lower clock speeds than Intel's cpus.

 

[arn]

I wonder whether this means that Steve was considering licensing out OS X.

that's what I was thinking.

arn

 

[pknz]

I wonder whether this means that Steve was considering licensing out OS X.

Sounds like it.

Fascinating story.

 

[Doctor Q]

It was such a please to stop explaining the megahertz myth over and over and over and ...

 

[Okes]

I wonder whether this means that Steve was considering licensing out OS X.

Or possibly rebranding viao's as macbook's?

 

[macbookflasher]

sounds good .

enchanting story !!!!!!

 

[Suboptimus]

I always enjoy learning about this aspect of the long transition from OS 9 and PPC to OS X and Intel, but I think it is disingenuous to present these stories as if the achievability of the task was uncertain and its completion was a surprising, watershed moment that got vice presidents to stop what they were doing and put Steve on an airplane.

OS X was promised for Intel; Apple shipped developer previews of OS X (as Rhapsody) for Intel. I have a copy of Rhapsody DR2 and have installed it on commodity PC hardware. It was a surprise and a let-down for developers when Apple decided to reneg on shipping the Intel version along with Yellow Box (Cocoa) for Windows. Rhapsody DR2 was released in 1998, this effort began in 2000 (before OS X 10.0, actually), so at most there is a two year gap where the status of the port is uncertain. It is likely that it was kept maintained for at least part of the gap, especially since Darwin was publicly released as an open-source project with Intel support in April 2000. What do you suppose the Intel version of Darwin was there for? No reason? It is certainly possible that in the crunch to get OS X to 10.0 for PPC the Intel port fell by the wayside and perhaps was no longer feature-complete, and this guy's job was to get it caught up, but it was still something they had sitting around the whole time.

That the Intel port could go from something they were already shipping in developer previews to something nobody within Apple even knew existed simply doesn't make sense. I understand that there were commercial reasons for Apple to maintain public silence on the topic, and to be very clear that their employees were expected to do the same, but I'm not about to believe these people convinced themselves that something they already knew existed as a shipping product didn't actually exist after all! In the wider world, the fact that Apple had maintained an Intel port of OS X was one of the worst-kept secrets in computer industry history. I agree that the actual time and place of the Intel switch announcement was a complete surprise, but the fact that the possibility existed was established when NEXTSTEP was released for Intel in I believe 1993.

 

[spacedesign911]

Or possibly rebranding viao's as macbook's?

Possible, but I'm sure apple could have pulled together their own clone of it, I agree he was trying to sell it to PC makers.

 

[macmastersam]

Could this mean anything for WWDC? like mac OS coming to a certain brand of pc?

 

[wikus]

I love the second comment on the 2005 thread LOL

"Expect Mac sales to tank in the next 1-2 years though..."

xD

I think the first comment is far more telling of the arrogance from the mac community.

As if PC users werent allowed to use Macs? This sentiment still exists today. Ultimately, it has ZEEEEEEEEEEEEROOOOOOOOO effect on anyones precious mac experience;

Person A has a Mac.
Person B has a PC.
Person A feels offended by the existence of PC.
Person B says: so what?

I recently called out the iPod Classic being an inferior device compared to the Cowon J3 and pointed out a list of FACTS on why that is so. I got TWELVE downrankings thus far. Jeff Smith-Luedke was right; Apple wants zero competition (in regards to HTC and Samsung release Android phones). The Mac userbase clearly has the same mentality and it really needs to stop RIGHT NOW.

Steve Jobs once said 'We have to let go of this notion that for Apple to win, Microsoft has to lose.' Well, as much as I know he didnt fully mean what he said (due to his hatred for Microsoft and Windows) he was actually right.

Furthermore, as a consumer, it only benefits us if there is competition, ultimately driving prices down, pushing innovation and bring forth better products for all. It seems like everyone on the Apple bandwagon just wants only Apple to exist and have innovation be stagnant.

I would be absolutely THRILLED if the macrumors admins made it a rule that any behaviour that displays such devotion lacking logic and rational be BANNED completely. All such posts should be removed as to contribute to an OBJECTIVE conversation in the forums without any fanboyism. I'm sick of it.

 

[Lancer]

I'm still using a G5 PowerMac but finally will take the plunge into Intel soon and get a new iMac when they (hopefully) are released next week, I'm told it will be faster

 

[thejadedmonkey]

That's pretty cool!

 

[Torrijos]

It was such a please to stop explaining the megahertz myth over and over and over and ...

Indeed, but then again how far have we come? Today it's all about the number of cores (while most software aren't optimized for parallelism), the amount of RAM on a device (not taking into account the way memory is managed by the OS), USB 3.0 (never talking about OS clutter or the overhead of the standard) so on and so forth.

Still it's a shame IBM couldn't improve on the POWER architecture to produce a complete range of CPUs for all kind of consumer devices.

 

[weckart]

At the time PPC was way faster even though in some cases the PowerPC cpu maybe a few hundred MHz slower.

My feeling at the time owning both architectures was completely the opposite and around the time hackintoshing became possible was demonstrably so. What PPC offered as benefits seemed to be cooler running notebooks and longer battery life. My iBook gave 4-5 hours whilst most Intel/AMD notebooks tended to run dry after 2-2.5hrs.

 

[Comeagain?]

Could this mean anything for WWDC? like mac OS coming to a certain brand of pc?

This doesn't have anything to do with wwdc. This is just an interesting article.

 

[opeter]

Now would be a good moment, that Apple (Tim Cook) would license MacOS to different PC manufacturers, since Steve Jobs is no more.

 

[antonis]

I recently called out the iPod Classic being an inferior device compared to the Cowon J3 and pointed out a list of FACTS on why that is so. I got TWELVE downrankings thus far. Jeff Smith-Luedke was right; Apple wants zero competition (in regards to HTC and Samsung release Android phones). The Mac userbase clearly has the same mentality and it really needs to stop RIGHT NOW.

That was more than expectable, though. You'd get the same downranking (if not even more) on a Microsoft forum if you've stated that Vista was a major fail and a very bloated OS, although you'd be telling the plain truth.

 

[Mike Oxard]

I would be absolutely THRILLED if the macrumors admins made it a rule that any behaviour that displays such devotion lacking logic and rational be BANNED completely. All such posts should be removed as to contribute to an OBJECTIVE conversation in the forums without any fanboyism. I'm sick of it.

I get the feeling you are in the wrong place.

 

[mrbofus]

Who's Joe?

"In JK's office, Joe watches in amazement"

There is no mention of Joe before this sentence. I assume we're supposed to infer that Joe is JK's boss? Why no mention of Joe or his last name?

And for that matter, introducing who Bertrand Serlet is might help too. "He comes back a few minutes later with Bertrand Serlet." is our first introduction with no mention of why he's important and gets to make demands.

 

[Tacitus]

that's what I was thinking.
arn

Given that Win8 has come in for some harsh criticism and Apple is now not wholly dependent on sales revenue from Macs since it has iPhones/iPad revenue, now might be a good time to license OSX to a select few Tier 1 vendors.......

Say, Sony, HP, Lenovo..... The real benefit would be to increase the market for the other things that Apple now does.