Intel Macs: The First 6 Years

Apple shocked a lot of Mac users in June 2005. After years of extolling the virtues of PowerPC processor architecture over Intel's x86 architecture, Steve Jobs dropped a bombshell at the Worldwide Developer Conference: Apple would make a transition from PowerPC architecture to Intel x86 within a year. Apple had been making x86 versions of Mac OS X all along, and the company would make Pentium-based development systems available so developers could compile their existing software for the new Mac hardware platform - and begin to write new code to take advantage of the new architecture.

Bill Gates addresses Jan. 1997 Macworld Expo.

Needless to say, we were stunned by the announcement. Steve Jobs had already shown how the thought different by having Bill Gates address the January 1997 Macworld Expo via video. Wasn't Microsoft the mortal enemy? No, said Jobs, Microsoft is a competitor but also a partner, and Microsoft was going to invest in Apple and promised to continue development of Office and Internet Explorer for years to come. Still, having Bill Gates address Mac users during a Stevenote was a shock.

Apple had been compiling OS X for Intel all along.

Going Intel was at least as shocking. Just as Apple and Microsoft were enemies in the world of operating systems, Intel and Apple were in opposing processor camps. Apple was going to abandon longtime partners IBM and Freescale to embrace Intel, which had always been viewed as the enemy. Steve Jobs certainly did think outside the box on this one, and while we worried that Macs would become nothing more than PCs and that our existing software would be left behind, he had it all figured out. Macs would still be unique hardware, and Intel Macs would include Rosetta, a program that let them run PowerPC software while the Mac world moved to Intel.

Jobs unveils the Intel iMac in Jan. 2006

We thought we had a year to get used to the whole idea, but at the January 2006 Macworld Expo, Jobs unveiled the first two Intel-based Macs - five months ahead of what we expected. That's the historical development we're looking at today, Apple's hardware transition from PowerPC to Intel - and how it has changed the platform.

Alan Zisman (Zis Mac): Just a year previously (more or less), Steve Jobs had provided a long explanation at a keynote on why PPCs were more efficient - why a computer built with a seemingly-slower PPC CPU could, in fact, get more computing done than another with an Intel-style CPU running at a faster clock speed - something about the number of pipelines.

The Mac-faithful (myself included) nodded our heads - "Of course." "Makes sense."

In a way, it reminded me of the flip-flops of Communist parties in the 1930s and 40s - first, the big enemy was Socialist parties. Then the Socialists were potential allies in a united front to fight fascism. Then Nazi Germany was an ally of the Soviet Union, and the US and UK were the enemy. Then Germany was the enemy and the US and UK were allies. And then....

Ironically, when Intel introduced the Pentium 4 series, the same discussion happened among PC-users: the Pentium III (P3) series CPUs were more efficient, but the Pentium 4 could be produced at higher clock speeds. Even more ironically, more recent Intel CPUs are more closely descended from that more-efficient P3 than the faster P4; hence the relative lack of dramatic increases in clock speeds over the past few years.

The new metric was performance per Watt.

Dan Knight (Mac Musings): It's interesting how Jobs positioned things in terms of performance per Watt, not traditional measurements of computing performance. I know the G5s were a bear to keep cool, especially the faster Power Mac G5s, and Apple was never able to produce a G5 PowerBook it was willing to ship.

Brian Gray (Fruitful Editing): My first Intel Mac was the first Intel MacBook Pro. I bought it used from a friend in 2009, three years after its introduction. Even though it was "old tech" at that point, the powerful 2.16 GHz Core Duo ran circles around my iMac G5. The machine was maxed out with the original purchase, so my only upgrade option was a bigger hard drive and OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard.

I loved that MacBook Pro, except for the outer skin. The brain inside was new, but the styling was so 2003. Heck, even the consumer MacBooks had magnetic latches!

My biggest regret in 2005 was purchasing that refurbed G5 iMac instead of waiting a little longer for the Intel Macs. I don't mean to speak ill of the dead here; I do love my iMac. It's still running great and has given me many years of faithful service. But there will always be that part of me that wished I had just been able to hold out for a few more months.

Allison Payne (The Budget Mac): The smartest decision Apple made in the 90s was bringing Steve Jobs back into the fold, and the smartest decision they made in the first decade of the 21st century was the transitioning to Intel. PPC technology wasn't progressing fast enough, and third-party chipmakers were either non-existent or still very new and small compared to Intel.

Apple needed a breath of fresh air in its hardware, and it was a stroke of genius to use a chip that would allow any Mac to run Windows natively. They didn't have to change much in the way of chassis design, but by adding Windows capability, it felt like a radically different fleet of products.

With Intel, the company would have a chance at getting a better hold in the enterprise arena, and by focusing advertising on potential switchers, they hooked a lot of people (particularly college students) away from cheaper Windows laptops.

I'm not sure if Apple knew at the time how successful the strategy would be, but it has certainly paid off handsomely.

Charles Moore (several columns): When Steve Jobs announced at WWDC 2005 that Apple would be switching to Intel processors from the PowerPC chips they'd been using for a decade, I was naturally curious how that would play out at the practical user level. The transition from 68k to PPC in the mid-90s had gone surprisingly smoothly, but could history repeat itself?

I decided to hedge my bets by purchasing what I anticipated would be my last PPC Mac, an Apple Certified Refurbished 1.33 GHz 17" PowerBook G4. The big laptop proved to be a good computer, and I used it for three years as my main digital hub system before handing it off to my wife, who is still using it, running OS X 10.5 Leopard. Actually, the 17-incher didn't turn out to be my last PPC Mac purchase. I subsequently bought two Pismo PowerBooks, but that's another movie.

My first, and thus far only, Intel Mac is a Late 2008 Aluminum Unibody MacBook that I bought - another Certified Refurbished unit - in March 2009, and it's been a better machine than I'd dared hope: fast (at least compared to what I'd been used to) and completely reliable. No problems or issues at all in just short of three years' intensive use. The original battery still has some life left in it, and the only time I've worked on this computer was to install a RAM upgrade to 4 GB.

The only sign of the gazillion hours I've logged on this Mac is that the hard drive, which was almost inaudibly silent when I got the MacBook, has become a bit more noticeable to the ear, but only enough that I can now hear it running.

I love my old Pismos, but if this MacBook keeps on the way it has, I may have to revise my pick for best Mac laptop ever.

Sebastian Patting (Edelweiss): When Apple buried OS 9, I didn't laugh. When Apple buried PowerPC, I didn't laugh (again). Though less picturesque, it was the same kind of absurdity. What had just been the lastest and greatest was suddenly too dated, too cumbersome, too inflexible to deserve further attention. As mentioned by my Low End Mac colleagues, just one year before the Intel switch Apple was still praising the PowerPC architecture as the future. In fact, as long-time Mac fans, part of our gospel was "we have modern RISC architecture, therefore we rule, and you CISC people suck". Well, kinda like that.

The sudden move to the allegedly inferior x86 architecture proved that Apple would betray its own principles as soon as it would promise an advantage. We would not have been surprised if Dell had done it. But Apple? Cupertino took pride in being not like the others. "Think different", remember?

Apart from the ability of running Windows software natively (which has hurt loyal Mac software companies - especially gaming companies, thank you!) I don't see much of a gain in the Intel switch from a users perspective. *silence* "Did he just say what he did?" *embarrased* Yes, call me whatever you want, a PowerPC Fanboy™ or an embittered Luddite. But really, my 6-year-old Power Mac G5 is my main computer and fast enough for everything I do. And that includes movie editing as well.

"Yes, but the latest Mac Pro is faster!"

Sure, but how fast is fast?

Much of the blame for switching to Intel was the inability of IBM to get out faster PowerPC CPUs, especially for PowerBooks. But if Apple would have really been the company that "thinks different", why didn't it instead tried to optimize Mac OS X performance and the user experience, thus increasing actual work speed? When you look in the mirror and see some grey hair, chances are you worked with the classic Mac OS during your younger years. And you remember, just like me, how effectively we were working on our early Macs. If Apple would have focused on its product instead of maximizing profits, it would have said, "Let's optimize PowerPC to the max!" However, Apple opted for more greenbacks. Too bad.

Simon Royal (Mac Spectrum): Sebastian, the move to Intel may have come as a shock, especially as Apple were touting PowerPC as better and superior, but there were internal builds of every version of OS X built for Intel, for x86. Apple had been planning this move for a long time, so it wasn't a sudden move.

IBM struggled to get faster, smaller, cooler chips, and Apple were being held back. No portables for a few years and the G5 struggling to be updated. Its okay to say Apple should have tweaked OS X, but that would have only been short term fix. They would have needed faster machines at some point.

The Wintel world would be steaming ahead with super fast 3, 4, and 5 GHz machines, and the Mac world would be playing with a tweaked quad-core 2.5 GHz machine. However you play it, that won't hold up.

Running on Intel architecture is a good idea. Since moving to Intel, the amount of software available - especially shareware/freeware and specialist tools - has grown massively. No more of the "you can't do that on a Mac" from grinning Windows users.

Charles Moore: Sebastian, excellent points, philosophically.

I do like the speed with the Intel chips. I think a central issue was that IBM had basically lost interest in the PC market, Motorola had spun of its microchip operations as Freescale, which appeared to be more interested in markets like automobile microprocessors, and so forth.

I also can't imagine Apple having the market share it's gained since 2006 without the native Windows capability.

Dan Knight: I don't think we can underestimate the importance of being able to run Windows natively on Mac hardware since the 2006 transition. Macs have had PC cards and emulators since the late 1980s, but they were all poor solutions for those who needed access to PC software on their Macs. Thanks to Intel x86 processors, Mac owners can now boot and run Windows on Macs - and often better than on name brand PC hardware. Add to that virtualization, which allows running Windows alongside Mac OS X, and Windows users risk almost nothing by giving Macs a try. At worst, they have an expensive Windows PC. At best, they slowly discover the power, flexibility, ease of use, and still virus-free world of Macintosh computing - perhaps even giving up on Windows over time.

For all the theoretical and even real world advantages Motorola 680x0 chips had over Intel CPUs of their era and PowerPC had over x86 in their era, the practical advantage of having Intel inside Macs catapulted them from a minority platform ignored by PC power users to become one of the leading PC brands across the board. Thank goodness Steve Jobs anticipated that PowerPC might one day run out of steam and made the bold decision to switch Mac processor architecure for a second time.