what if apple had stayed with powerpc

[blindpcguy]

good point there I'm happy with the way it all ended up but it defiantly is interesting hearing everyones opinion and gaining more infomation on the matter so far it defiantly changed my opinion and my first mac waas intel i just love the ol;d ppc machines

 

[MysticCow]

It wouldn't have ended well. PowerPC was dead-ending, and let's just be frank about it. The G5 could never have fit into a powerful laptop without the gigantic heat sink in the pic on page 1. The G4 WAS AT a dead end. DDR and G4 didn't mix.

If anything, we'd be seeing more ARM processor Macs, which wouldn't work for a lot of powerful users.

 

[seinman]

Oops, wrong thread

 

[bobesch]

Hardware doesn't really matter, if there were software-updates for older stuff...
I wouldn't care about wether PPC or Intel or ARM is powering my machine, as long as new features are supported.
It would be easy to supply support for iCloud (like SOHO-Organizer does) or iMessage, but below a certain level of CPU-power a lot of consuming processes running in the background slow down everything to a level that doesn't make you love your old stuff. It's not always planned obsolescence by the developer of hardware, but simply the sum of new tasks or just bloated programming of software or webpages.
So I'm quite happy with my old PPC-stuff as it is:
- a still working tiny museum of computing history
- hardware for special tasks and settings (the basics: Office, email, webDAV, FTP/FileSharing, ScreenSharing/VNC etc.)
With these options of connectivity the old machines are still an active member of my Mac and Win environment.

 

[Bug-Creator]

The roadmap of the PPC architecture was—and still is—focussed on servers and high-end workstations,

The roadmap for PPC (what little there is) is focussed on servers and high-end workstations (and actually quite a lot of embeeded stuff) cos the only costumer for desktop class CPU jumped ship in 2005 ....

like steve said on stage they had internal builds running on intel for years

When Jobs rejoined Apple he brought with him NextStep running on x86 (and 68k, not sure wether that was still uptodate at that time), so I wouldn't be suprised if the 1st x86 build of OSX even predates the PPC one.

 

[throAU]

When Jobs rejoined Apple he brought with him NextStep running on x86 (and 68k, not sure wether that was still uptodate at that time), so I wouldn't be suprised if the 1st x86 build of OSX even predates the PPC one.

I would make that bet also.

OS X started life as NextStep as per above, and it was running on intel back in the days of the 486.

I would guarantee that the code base was maintained to some degree during the time, or at the very least, the updates turning NEXT into OS X were written with a view towards being as platform agnostic as possible - because Apple had to shift CPUs in the past, they'd definitely be aware of the possible future need.


edit:
know your ancestors circa 1993. You can see a lot of the origins of OS X in that.

 

[pochopsp]

WOW it was really at the forefront for that time! It does a lot of tasks to be a 23 years old computer!

 

[MysticCow]

When Jobs rejoined Apple he brought with him NextStep running on x86 (and 68k, not sure wether that was still uptodate at that time), so I wouldn't be suprised if the 1st x86 build of OSX even predates the PPC one.

It was revealed in 2005 that every single OS X has an Intel counterpart and it happened simultaneously. Since NEXTStep was originally X86, I am more than willing to bet OS X was first completed on Intel every single time.

 

[throAU]

WOW it was really at the forefront for that time! It does a lot of tasks to be a 23 years old computer!

NEXT was at least 15 years ahead of anything else on the market.

In OS X, the dock, the services menu and most of Cocoa originated on the NEXT platform.

NEXT was expensive (relative to other personal computers), but it was truly light years ahead of anything else in its day - and price competitive compared to proper workstations like Sun, and WAY easier to develop for. I mean, the Mac was System 7 (i think) with no memory protection, crappy multi-tasking, etc. Windows was Windows 3.1.

First web browser was built on a NEXT workstation, as was the original DOOM.

Pretty much all the cool stuff in OS X is originally from NEXT. OS X is just basically NEXTSTEP with updated libraries and a Mac OS skin (and previously, compatibility layers) on it.

 

[Orizence]

Speaking of NEXT am I the only one who would love to get my hands on a NEXT Cube?

 

[throAU]

Speaking of NEXT am I the only one who would love to get my hands on a NEXT Cube?

No you are not

 

[MacCubed]

Speaking of NEXT am I the only one who would love to get my hands on a NEXT Cube?

I'd love one!!! But from the videos I've seen, they're pretty loud, and quite large

 

[throAU]

I'd love one as a piece of history, but really; if you want a machine to run NextSTEP you already have it. All the cool stuff from NextSTEP is still there or has been replaced with cooler stuff.

Back in the day a 68030 or 68040 was pretty quick, but time moves on.

 

[Orizence]

I tried building a Next machine off of generic x86 hardware but I could never get the IDE Interface to be recognized and consequently gave up; that was a long time ago and now I have no spare money to spend on computers I dont need.

Oh well maybe someday in the future Ill try again

 

[b0fh666]

can we run nextstep in virtualbox?

 

[WalkerTexasRanger]

can we run nextstep in virtualbox?

Probably so, there was an x86 compatible version of it.

 

[throAU]

Probably so, there was an x86 compatible version of it.

I believe it actually doesn't work due to some obscure virtualisation problem.

That was many years ago last I checked though.

 

[LightBulbFun]

You can run Next/OpenStep in VMware even Rhapsody can run in it. I think you can make it run in VirtualBox but the lack of drivers make the experience less than stella.

 

[AFEPPL]

Mac would have significantly less market share is the real answer.

 

[WalkerTexasRanger]

You can run Next/OpenStep in VMware even Rhapsody can run in it. I think you can make it run in VirtualBox but the lack of drivers make the experience less than stella.

That looks neato, I might have to play around with that some time.

 

[Majoris]

Well IBM promoted better chips and semiconductor fabrications. Apple wasn't going to put their money in the PowerPC because intels vision was diffrent. Making cheaper cpu's with less voltage and still get decent instructions per cycle. Intel won that battle. IBM went back to supercomp

What if Apple had stayed with PowerPC? Well...

I think if you take the super slim ps3. Attatch a screen to it. You have a modern desktop of the powerpc family.

 

[0248294]

I think if you take the super slim ps3. Attatch a screen to it. You have a modern desktop of the powerpc family.

Well, sort of. The Cell processor was mostly based off of the 64-bit PowerPC architecture, but there's still quite a few differences between the two. And the same can be said about the Wii U, it's Espresso CPU is still largely based on the PowerPC G3 750 processor, much like the Wii's Broadway and the GameCube's Gekko processors. But they still have significant differences, as the Espresso will outclass any vanilla PowerPC G3 750 by miles, performance wise.

 

[Majoris]

Well, sort of. The Cell processor was mostly based off of the 64-bit PowerPC architecture, but there's still quite a few differences between the two. And the same can be said about the Wii U, it's Espresso CPU is still largely based on the PowerPC G3 750 processor, much like the Wii's Broadway and the GameCube's Gekko processors. But they still have significant differences, as the Espresso will outclass any vanilla PowerPC G3 750 by miles, performance wise.

I was only doing a minor comparison of size. There wouldn't and couldn't be an effecient size for a laptop(for powerpc). It belongs in a workstation or supercomputer. The only risc cpu that went in a laptop(the size of a modern laptop after the G4) was a mips. http://lemote.kd85.com/

 

[Brad9893]

Here's another what if...

What would have happened to NeXT and NeXTSTEP if Apple had decided to purchase another company (like Be) instead?

 

[bunnspecial]

What would have happened to NeXT and NeXTSTEP if Apple had decided to purchase another company (like Be) instead?

That is indeed an interesting what-if.

My 9600 came to me with BeOS installed, and I dumped it for OS 9 almost immediately. I'm wishing I'd saved the install. One really interesting thing about BeOS is that-as far as I know-it's the only OS that can fully utilize both processors in my 9600. Even OS X Tiger(which @LightBulbFun was able to get running on 60x series processors) only sees one of the processors in the system. OS 9 knows they're both there, but can't do anything with them.

NeXT had a good case if nothing else due to the Steve Jobs connection.

Things were a lot more interesting when we had a bunch of completely different OSs running around. Now everything is essentially either WinNT derived or a *nix variant...I know there are a billion and a half Linux distros out there, but under the hood they're more alike than different. OS X does sort of stand out because it's maintained by a major computer company and has what is(IMO) the best GUI around, but is still BSD Unix underneath it all.

And, not to ramble too much, but NT 3.5 and NT 4.0 were compiled compiled for a handful of architectures. The NT 4.0 disk I just looked at lists PowerPC, MIPS, and Alpha in addition to a couple of x86 processors. The only problem was that in the mid-90s, the most common PPC machines were Macs and the most common MIPS machines were Silicon Graphics. WinNT will run on neither of these platforms-AFAIK its PPC support is limited to the handful of PPC machines IBM made, and I don't know offhand who other than SGI used MIPS processors.