On Mar 21, 2011, at 10:54 AM, ah...clem wrote: > none of which would have been so easy or even possible had they not > pretended that they were "forced" to switch to the grossly inferior > intel CPUs.
There was no pretense involved here at all. IBM had no interest in making low-power, high-performance PPC processors for Apple, Motorola, errr, 'Freescale' couldn't and the primary driver of computer sales (laptops) was rapidly leaving Apple behind. Other companies were introducing Pentium mobile, pentium dual., and even Core systems when Apple was stuck with an architecture last updated when the Pentium 3 was king, and desktop systems that substituted for industrial space heaters. It was a dead end. Meanwhile Intel had made big strides from the days when 'power management' equalled 'slow the CPU to a crawl' days of the Centrino. I have the latest and greatest ever PPC laptop, an AlBook 1.67 ghz system. compared to even the worst performing Macbook, it suuuuuuuucks. It's perfectly usable (it's in daily use) but I don't make any pretense about it being a modern, 'capable of anything' laptop. Anyone still clinging to the concept that the PPC is somehow better than the Intel chips for general purpose computing are delusional regardless of what IBM has brought out for game consoles and servers. Had IBM actually cared about retaining Apple as a major chip business client, things may have turned out differently, but I doubt it...Intel's great strength is their economy of scale...if everyone is using their CPU's and chipsets to make computers, they're cheaper, and cheaper to make faster. This economy of scale is what drives Moore's Law, after all. Smartest thing Apple ever did was to move to Intel; you'll note that their 'meteoric' ascendance coincides twith the intrduction of the Intel Macs. They did well before, but their growth curve has been exponential since then. And all the lessons they learned managing OS X for two different architectures for so long paid off in spades when it came time to add a third and fourth (ARM and Apple's new CPU's in the iPhone and iPad)...Apple now has an OS scalable like MS only dreams it could ever have done and they've been doing it for longer. (Don't forget, there WAS a version of NT that ran on the Dec Alpha and the Motorola ChRP chipset...which was yet ANOTHER time Moto screwed over Apple by overpromising and underdelivering) -- Bruce Johnson University of Arizona College of Pharmacy Information Technology Group Institutions do not have opinions, merely customs -- You received this message because you are a member of G-Group, a group for those using G3, G4, and G5 desktop Macs - with a particular focus on Power Macs. The list FAQ is at http://lowendmac.com/lists/g-list.shtml and our netiquette guide is at http://www.lowendmac.com/lists/netiquette.shtml To post to this group, send email to g3-5-list@googlegroups.com For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/g3-5-list
