IBM to Purchase Up to 200,000 Macs, With 50-75% of Employees Ultimately Switching From Lenovo

[jm001]

And, Intel was on a meltdown path with their CPUs (power-hogs) as well. I'd be curious if it was Apple that convinced them to head down the 'core' path of lower power, or if that had been in the plans before Apple started down that path. It was widely believed, at the time, that speed was the problem, but actually the last G5s were ahead of the Intel counterparts. Apple just saw the writing on the wall about that not being sustainable.

And, it will be interesting to see where this goes in the future, as it seems the old RISC debate is surfacing again concerning the future for speed gains, while maintaining power consumption.

I wonder, if IBM did deliver on it's promises to Apple and even surpassed them, if we'd still be using PowerMacs today or would we still end up Intel? I remember the rumours that while the G5 was supposedly still #1 at Apple, there was a "secret" project going on to get OS X onto Intel based machines.

 

[MagnusVonMagnum]

I wonder, if IBM did deliver on it's promises to Apple and even surpassed them, if we'd still be using PowerMacs today or would we still end up Intel? I remember the rumours that while the G5 was supposedly still #1 at Apple, there was a "secret" project going on to get OS X onto Intel based machines.

From what I've read Steve Jobs revealed in 2005 that they had maintained OS X for Intel all along, even in its earliest versions ported from NeXTSTEP (which was ported to Intel by 1991 from Motorola 68030/40 code), so there was no "secret project" except in the sense that they had kept it a secret that every single version of OS X was maintained internally for Intel just-in-case they needed to switch hardware platforms. They could have sold them on Intel at any time prior to 2006. Getting existing applications working was the real issue (that's where the emulator Rosetta came in which was licensed from Transitive Corporation from the program called "QuickTransit"). Without Rosetta, the Intel transition would likely have been a mess at best and possibly fatal for Apple at worst.

 

[SteveW928]

I wonder, if IBM did deliver on it's promises to Apple and even surpassed them, if we'd still be using PowerMacs today or would we still end up Intel? I remember the rumours that while the G5 was supposedly still #1 at Apple, there was a "secret" project going on to get OS X onto Intel based machines.

In addition to what MagnusVonMagnum said, I guess software compatibility and development was as much or more a factor as performance.