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Comment by bsder | Hacker News Reader

> Apple were already well behind in performance at the point x86_64 came out, due to them being stuck on POWER.

The issue was chipsets and peripherals, not POWER performance (which generally always beat x86 at the same point).

The problem was that the entire ecosystem was built around communicating with an x86. So, you couldn't get a Northbridge or Southbridge equivalent that was even remotely close in performance or power consumption to those in x86 space.

Unless you decided that you were going to take on everything in chip design, you couldn't compete. And Apple didn't decide to take on everything until Intel told Apple to pound sand and pissed Jobs off.

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Absolutely false. They had to use liquid cooling in their top Mac at the time and it was still behind an opteron. Then the intel core architecture came out and pretty much destroyed it performance wise.

The way I remember is that they couldn't get a PPC of the current (at the time) generation suitable for laptops - too power hungry, too hot. IBM weren't interested in supplying such a part so Apple were really left with no choice. It was a similar story of moving from 68k to PPC - the 68060 wasn't what they needed.

There has never been a PowerPC system that beats x86 at any price point.

You are far too young.

The 601 based PowerPC's were the first to be able to do 3D graphics on the microprocessor well.

The G4 based titanium Powerbooks were sufficiently better that they became iconic at a time that Apple wasn't regarded that well.

Sure, the G5 and up were disastrous, but the writing was on the wall well before that. Chipsets on the G3 and G4-based systems used more power than the processor and that only became untrue because the G5 was quite so poor.

>not POWER performance (which generally always beat x86 at the same point).

Do you have a source for this? First time I've seen anyone claim that the G5 was competitive with contemporary Intel CPUs.

Contemporary Apple marketing that was extremely proficient at putting Power in a favorable light (just sneak enough Altivec into every comparison to make up for the rest) + every single (of the then few) Mac users who parotted it religiously?

Those were different times for Apple. The ship was noticeably turned, but the storm not over yet.

By the time the G5 required massive liquid cooling rigs and was nowhere near ready for laptop use... even die-hard Mac users were not parroting the party line any more. For most, the Intel move was a welcome one, as that was also during the height of the move from desktop to laptop. There was almost no chance for a decent G5-based laptop, at least not one as nice and sleek as the G4s that were already in existence.

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