Why was running on Intel important to Apple? Apple didn't use Intel at that time (Dec 1996), and didn't decide to use Intel until much later (announced 2005)? Whereas BeOS already did run on the CPU platform that Apple did use at that time?
I don't have any insider information, but I wouldn't be surprised if Apple felt like they needed a backup plan in case the PowerPC alliance was unsuccessful at matching the speed growth of Intel's products. I'd say the G3 was the first PowerPC CPU that impressed me, I think Apple only stuck with PowerPC for two more generations (the G5).
The PowerPC allowed Apple to overtake the Pentium and gave it boasting rights until the failure of the G5.
Of course, POWER would go on to be a great arch for desktop and server use, but that wasn't enough for Apple after the G4.
My opinion: when released, performance didn't meet my expectations and failed to meet my expectations for another five years (when the G3 was released). IMHO, I don't believe the Mac was competitive against the PC until the release of the G4. I could understand why Apple would want to hedge against the PowerPC.
And of course, as those from the Lost Amiga Civilization recall, it took about a 500 MHz Windows 9x PC to feel as responsive as a 25 MHz Amiga.
I do suspect that Photoshop filters might get some real performance gains out of AltiVec instructions, maybe my boring developer style workloads weren't reaping similar benefits from the availability of those instructions.
Running on Intel certainly saved NeXT in that by version 3.3 with the ability to support IDE CD-ROM's the cost of a machine that could run NeXTSTEP 3.3 had dropped dramatically. It's just a shame that the OS cost nearly as much as the machine.
Being more open like the later Darwin sure may have helped, although I don't think NeXT much like later on Apple really wanted to either take in code from outsiders, or made the open software rediably usable.
Or, perhaps Apple was considering switching earlier than they did. Maybe they thought G3->G4 was going to experience the problems that didn't end up cropping up until G4->G5.
Apple was working on X86 compatibility as early as Mac OS 7 in 1992. [1]
The iPhone just further cemented Apple's position as the device people want to carry to consume media. I don't see how going with Gasse or Be would have made the Apple of today possible.
Also, I believe around that time the deal between IBM and Motorola was ending and they had already decided not to continue development of the PowerPC.
It's an interesting bit of history about how many very bright engineers had zero faith in intel being able pull off what they did with the P6 micro architecture: A superscalar, out-of-order x86 CPU that supported SMP on a power budget that, while high for the time (25 watts!), wasn't astronomical. That breakthrough ultimately became the foundation for Intel's Core micro architecture, which Apple later adopted in their first intel-based machines.
If Apple had switched to Intel with the arrival of the Pentium, things could have been very different.
This was quite a stretch of time (92->97?). What happened after that, though, was that Intel hit the afterburners, and rocketed up to about 800mhz, and PPC got left in the dust. There was a huge 500mhz speed bump that the G3 and G4 both stalled at for a few years, and by the time they got over that, the pentium 4 was coming out, which started another jump from the P3's 1.5ghz, pushing the P4 up to about 3.5ghz.
The G3 and G4 were much faster than either the 603 or P2/P3 and especially the P4, per mhz, so the launch day ad campaign saying the iMac's 233mhz CPU was "twice as fast" as the 250mhz pentiums that were out at the same time was true - it just didn't stay true once 500 mhz P2 machines came out less than a year later. It's notable that intel was so focused on the marketability of that metric that the later pentium series were worse per clock than their predecessors - a P4 had to actually be several hundred mhz faster than a P3 to be the same speed. Intel was primarily doing this to fight AMD, and it got bad enough that AMD actually had to introduce a new marketing term to indicate how fast their chips were compared to the mhz ratings of P4s.
Intel completely reversed course on this with the core series - modern "core" chips like the i5 and i7 are several times faster than P4s running at the same clock speed. Far better heat/power consumption specs, too.
I’ve no doubt that internally Apple engineers knew this.
The Rhapsody DR1/DR2 releases that would shape up to become OS X Server 1.0 were intel based. And the then released source code for Darwin 0.1/Darwin 0.3 although commercially only released on the PowerPC, still compiles and runs on i386 just fine.
I'm sure with the overhaul of the kernel while going from OS X Server 1.0 to OS X 10.0 where the Objective C driver model was dumped for a C++ framework, along with updating the Mach code from 2.5 to 3.0 broke the i386, but it was quickly fixed in the Darwin releases, making the overall chain unbroken from the inside.
It wouldn't surprise me in the lost years of Apple looking for a plan out of the demise of the 68000 that there would have been projects looking again and again at Intel, especially after the Star Trek project.
Of course the NeXT merger brought back Steve Jobs who killed the clone program immediately.
https://virtuallyfun.com/wordpress/2017/04/22/darwin-0-1-rha...
You had Improv, which when Lotus killed it, was cloned into Quantrix which is still sold today to financial modelers.
You had the McCaw Cellular custom app (don't know what it was called) that allowed them to grow - they later became Cingular, then ATT Wireless. William Morris Agency, Booz Allen Hamilton (big consulting firm), etc. all had custom apps that they used under NeXT.
In contrast, BeOS had a few small desktop apps and some other cool demos.