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what if apple had stayed with powerpc

bunnspecial said:
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.
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Do you know why OS X doesn't fully utilize both processors in the 9600? I thought that symmetric multiprocessing was one of the features that Apple always promoted back when they announced OS X and prepared to make the transition to it.

I'm too young to remember when there were a bunch of completely different OS's on the market, but I do agree that it was a far more interesting time than what we have now. Everything is so standardized these days that it sometimes gets boring, and I doubt that will ever change. I highly doubt that anyone will create a completely new platform that's not a descendent of something that already exists.
 
Apple should have bought Be Inc. and NeXT. That would have done 3 things:

1) We would have more "Classic" iterations, I mean, Mac OS 8-9 would have lasted a little more.

2) We could have BeOS working on all G3 and G4. BeOS would have been a perfect transition OS for PowerPC from '99 to '02 between OS 9 and OS X
. While NeXT OS port to PowerPC was on beta (until Panther I consider all Mac OS X versions just betas, far away from OS 9 functionality/NeXT x86 stability) we could have a GOOD rich multimedia OS instead of Puma/Jaguar.

3) Apple Mac OS X team would have a serious "BeMac" OS competition team to benchmark with, and that would have benefited us users. No more final users to be "beta testers" for Apple for free.

Probably Steve Jobs said "NeXT or Be Inc, but you can't have both" at that time after Pixar "Toy Story" success He were back again in business in a strong position.

If Apple would have invested a little cash in I+D with Motorola/Freescale after the iPod gold mine, the e600 family and other Processor roadmap could have been chosen. Motorola G5 project would have success. IBM wasn't the only choice

If the "universal binaries" concept weren't so short-lived we could still be using 2016 universal apps on Leopard PPC, but Apple was so lazy making new Xcode versions ... They are to be hated on how quick they ditched the OS9-OSX carbon ability and how quick they ditched the PPC-Intel Universal ability.
 
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The CPU problem was that PPC had no powe efficient CPU and apple (correctly) predicted that the world was going mobile - notebooks instead of desktops.

If apple didn't have a competitive battery life on their notebooks then the OS X platform was dead. End of story.

IBM was not interested in PPC on the desktop or mobile market. Intel made massive battery life gains with th core series and in terms of processing per watt 10 years later they a still lead the field, but arm is closing.


As I understand it, apples purchase of next was sort of a reverse buy out. On the face of it apple bought next. From a technology perspective, next took over apple.
 
throAU said:
As I understand it, apples purchase of next was sort of a reverse buy out. On the face of it apple bought next. From a technology perspective, next took over apple.
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Yes, you are right about that. After the acquisition, Apple and it's leaders were supposed to dominant, and Steve Jobs was just supposed to be Gil Amelio's advisor. Of course, he did not like Amelio or Apple's execs at the time; he disliked CTO Ellen Hancock in particular and constantly referred to her as "the bozo" in public. Then Steve flipped the tables on the all of them and got Amelio ousted and himself appointed as the interim CEO (or iCEO as he called himself). Afterwards he appointed all of his former NeXT execs as SVP's at Apple.

The "reverse acquisition" was definitely unintended. It certainly a great thing for Apple and it's continued existence, but man, the leadership of Apple at the time really screwed themselves over big time.

The funny thing about this was that they were going to purchase Jean Louis Gassee's Be, but he jacked up the price of the company at the last second thinking that Apple was so desperate that they would be willing to pay whatever he wanted. Be wanted $250 million, but Apple wasn't willing to pay more than $200 million. So, what did Apple decide to do instead? They went out and decided that it would be a good idea to spend over $400 million on NeXT. I mean, I'm glad they did, but it definitely was a poor decision for a company that was getting closer and closer to bankruptcy by the month.
 
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Brad9893 said:
Yes, it definitely did! It probably worked out far better than anyone could have ever hoped for, but they couldn't have known that at the time.
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Oh it was a crapshoot. Nobody knew what the roll of the dice would have been during this time. But as I've said in another thread, we got the iMac G3 after Jobs came back which single-handedly saved Apple from destruction.

ppcebay said:
We would be probably still speaking about the forthcoming Powerbook G5.
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It's funny because it's true.
 
MysticCow said:
Oh it was a crapshoot. Nobody knew what the roll of the dice would have been during this time. But as I've said in another thread, we got the iMac G3 after Jobs came back which single-handedly saved Apple from destruction.
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Can you tell me what the general feeling was after the iMac G3 was originally introduced in 1998? Was it a feeling of relief and optimism? Did people look at the iMac as if it was a fantastic product that would save Apple from doom right away, or did it take time for it to become clear? I'm curious, because most of the stuff that I can still find on the Internet from that time is pessimistic and laments the loss of the floppy and old Apple IO.
 
Brad9893 said:
Do you know why OS X doesn't fully utilize both processors in the 9600?
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The 9600 wasn't natively supported in OS X. The 9600 had support for System 7.5.5 through Mac OS 9.1, this is probably the biggest reason that the second processor isn't recognized in OS X. Even as it sits, system profiler shots from 60x based macs running Tiger show the processor as "PowerPC" since OS X has no idea what the processor is.
 
Brad9893 said:
Can you tell me what the general feeling was after the iMac G3 was originally introduced in 1998? Was it a feeling of relief and optimism? Did people look at the iMac as if it was a fantastic product that would save Apple from doom right away, or did it take time for it to become clear? I'm curious, because most of the stuff that I can still find on the Internet from that time is pessimistic and laments the loss of the floppy and old Apple IO.
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Oh they comment/cry about anything. I've learned over the years to ignore the crying and lamenting.

However, the facts still stand and history has destroyed their crying--the iMac G3 saved Apple from destruction.
 
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