Intel in Macs (2007) | Hacker News Reader

Intel in Macs (2007)

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"On the very day the company officially announced its first Intel-based product, Apple's stock price closed at $80.86"

How cool!

https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20060110/1818234_F.shtml

The stock split 7-for-1 in 2014, so $80 in 2006 is about $11 per current stock, which is worth $372 today.

It's been a great time to own Apple Stock!

It’s generally been a good time to own the stock for the last two decades ;)

While true, spectacularly so for Apple. If you had bought shares of the company instead of a new base-model PowerBook G4, you'd have over $700k today.

If instead of a "founders' edition" Tesla Model S you'd bought shares of Tesla, you'd have enough money for fifty Teslas today.

If you'd bought NDVA shares instead of Nvidia's best GPU in 2009 ... you still would not be able to afford Nvidia's current best GPU. Hrmm.

NVIDIA also gave out dividends (I believe Tesla does not?). Looks like $500 in NVDA in 2009 becomes almost $20k of total return by today. (https://dqydj.com/stock-return-calculator/)

You won't believe how much their most expensive product costs.

How I got Nvidia’s most expensive GPU using one weird tip

I am starting a newsletter where I can say that I got 10 out of the last 10 picks right! I will have one reviewer who will testify that every one of my picks sent to him was correct. To bad I won't be able to include the other 1023 reviewers :-(

That's... Not really a fair comparison. Nvidia didn't introduce their Enterprise line until 2010, so you're comparing a gaming card to a professional card. Nvidia stock has certainly gone up many multiples of what a geforce costs.

In 1999 at the age of 18, just before going to University to study Software Engineering I spent all my savings from my first job on a Beige G3 233Mhz. The box was $3k, the 17 inch Apple/Sony Trinitron another $1500. Dad drove it home in his car that was worth less than the contents of the big cardboard boxes.

Sometimes it's fun to calculate how much I'd have if I spent those 1999 dollars on APPL.

Well, I did some BTC mining on my atom board in the day. Also there is that guys that bought a pizza for 10K btc.

> Sometimes it's fun to calculate how much I'd have if I spent those 1999 dollars on APPL.

How much would you have if you'd invested in pets.com

How much did that G3 help you on your road to a high paying software engineering job?

Although not a fair comparison. I laughed out so loud reading the last sentence.

I'm guessing the NVDA part was a joke.

In 2009, NVDA was around $10. It is trading 40x, over $400.

Yes it is a joke. Nvidia now sells things that cost a million dollars.

With the shares you could’ve bought instead of spending on a top end Mac Pro setup in 2011, you might be able to afford two monitor stands now.

/sarcasm

I’m glad that Apple ditched the trash can Mac design, but I just haven’t been able to mentally justify the new Mac Pro’s price tag. Really curious what Apple will do on the high end side with ARM. Going to sit on my heavily upgraded 2011 Mac Pro a bit longer and see.

I bought about $1000 worth of Apple in 2000 and sold in 2005 to take my profits. I try not to think about that too much.

You’re not alone. I’ve sold at some awful times. I haven’t lost much though, and that’s probably more important. If you generally walk away with more, you’re doing good enough.

Unless this is your only income or something.

If its your only income and you cant get away when you think things are weird, you need to get a real job.

I've recently realized that whenever I do really well in an investment I always sell it too soon. I've come to the conclusion there are really only 3 reasons I will sell anything in the future.

  1. I need the money for something that isn't frivolous. (ie: house down payment, retirement income, etc...)
  2. I found another equal or better investment I will put the proceeds into immediately.
  3. Something has fundamentally changed about the company or it's market that calls into question it's future prospects beyond regular market competition.

> Something has fundamentally changed

That right there's the problem, see. By then, it's usually well past the ideal time to sell.

The notion that you can ever sell at the absolute ideal time is a fantasy. The market typically takes a while to reflect fundamental change and does so gradually over time.

Look at Nokia for example. From the day the iPhone was announced you could have sold at almost any time in the next 1.5 years and come out ahead vs acting immediately. Initially the market thought the iPhone was positive for Nokia, it took that long for people to realize it would be their demise.

It definitely wasn't clear that Apple was going to dominate the market for those 1.5 years. Most people expected that HTC, Palm, RIM, and Nokia were going to respond with better offerings for a better price. Most people in tech hated the early iPhones and thought it was going to be a failure. I wouldn't have sold my Nokia stock in the first 1.5 years.

Overall yes it wasn't clear to most commentators, but there were actually plenty of people who predicted pretty much exactly what would happen and why, Horace Dediu for example.

When the iPhone came out I knew Apple would own the future, I could feel it in my bones not only because their software technology was so ridiculously far in advance of everyone else, but because none of their competitors except Google even seemed aware what was happening or why and Google at the time wasn't even in the game yet. A lot of my friends thought I was going a bit crazy, I was so sure Apple was going to utterly own the future. I was entranced by the early iPhones, they felt like something out of Star Trek except even better. Maybe part of it was I always hated mobile phones, they were so clunky and ugly and the tech was so primitive. The iPhone felt like an advanced graphics workstation in an era of teletype terminals.

The problem was I was recently married, had two kids and we'd just bought our first house at a huge financial stretch, and had no spare savings whasoever. We were practically living hand to mouth. When we did have spare savings 6 or 7 years later I did consider buying some APPL, but I thought most of the opportunity cost had already passed and Android seemed to be catching up at last. Dumb.

But honestly, imagine what today would be like if Andy Rubin hadn't immediately ditched their plans for Android to be a BlackBerry clone and switched tracks to cloning the iPhone. Microsoft genuinely didn't get it. They took 3 years to even realise there was a problem.

Sorry, ranting, but thinking about this really triggered memories from that era.

> there were actually plenty of people who predicted pretty much exactly what would happen and why

You have the full spectrum of opinions on what will happen and why for pretty much every non-trivial topic. It's the power of hindsight that lets you select the correct ones and maybe even assume that it was indeed trivial, all the information was out there.

Would you bet your life savings on that one person who predicts against the trend? That's not dumb, it's realistic and cautious. In some situations the risk isn't worth it.

My impression of prominent criticism of the early iPhone was that it was shallow and self serving. The things competitors were saying about it, like implying it wouldn't be successful because people really wanted a real keyboard, seemed ridiculous as a serious rational.

It is generally safe to assume, baring strong evidence to the contrary, that a large dominant incumbent will fail to adapt in the face of fundamental change to an industry brought by a new entrant.

That there are still large groups of people that take the other side of this assumption is surprising to me. The most recent prominent example is everyone out there saying that incumbent car companies are going to out complete Tesla in electric or self driving cars. That view seems to be on the verge of being undeniably wrong.

> My impression of prominent criticism of the early iPhone was that it was shallow and self serving. The things competitors were saying about it, like implying it wouldn't be successful because people really wanted a real keyboard, seemed ridiculous as a serious rational.

That wasn't a ridiculous idea at all at the time. The lack of tactile feedback was (and is) a legitimate industrial design concern, and it had a learning curve that was difficult for many people.[1] I had many customers at the time who demanded continued support for their blackberries because of the difficulty they had with the iPhone keyboard. Heck, even I chose to go with an HTC device that had a hard keyboard, because I found it easier.

Everyone now finds modern on-screen keyboards to be intuitive, partially because they've improved and they're larger, but also because people understand how they work. At the time of the iPhone launch, people didn't understand auto-correct or how they didn't have to worry about how their thumbs were larger than the keys.

Even Jobs himself admitted there was a learning curve: "Once you learn to trust the keyboard, it’s a better keyboard."[0]

0: https://radarla.com/interview-steve-jobs/

1: https://discussions.apple.com/thread/1497367

Number 2 can be useful as part of a tax minimization strategy as you reset your basis when you move to a similar asset. Some people do this after long term gains kick in and there’s a small drop. I am not a tax lawyer... https://www.investopedia.com/terms/t/taxgainlossharvesting.a...

I didn't buy Google when they IPO'd because my Morgan Stanley broker (whom they ipo'ed through) convinced me not to.

I also didn't buy Tesla at $250 last year, because i would have had the minor inconvenience of transferring my 401k to a full brokerage.

Believe you me, being foolish is very easy.

Very easy in hindsight of course.

I bought Tesla at 25$... sold at 125$, currently at what 1200$?

Currently at $1400. How many shares did you buy?

400...

Its wierd that instead of beeing happy for making a bit of money, im sad i didnt make half a mill.

1upper: I went all in on Apple stock shortly after the iPhone debuted in 2007, and I mean all in ... I was that sure. At one point I controlled 1700 pre-split shares. For a while it looked like I'd struck gold.

Well, guess who lost everything on a margin call in 2009. Wall Street found a way to !@$#^ me. Just looked, current price four and a half million. :-/

I love anecdotes like this, even if they make you facepalm all these years later. Here is mine (numbers are guesstimates):

Was given a single, paper share of Apple stock in 2000 on my 21st birthday. Worth maybe $24? Lost it and forgot about it. Found it in the Summer of 2013 and excitedly cashed it in for TSLA, which was around $117. Today, those 7 shares are now hovering around $10k in value and represents my only stocks of any kind. Here's hoping the momentum continues.

I had placed an after-hours order on September 10th, 2001 at a bit under the market price which didn’t go through until the markets re-opened, at which point the price was $17. I wish I’d placed a larger order.

It's awesome trivia like this that keeps me hooked on hn.

That doesn't seem to check out. Apple announced the first Intel-based iMac and MacBook Pro on January 10, 2006, when AAPL closed at $11.55.

AAPL did have a daily low of $80.86 on December 24, 2013.

You’re not accounting for the 1 to 7 stock split. 7 * 11.55

As mentioned by a sibling comment, Apple's stock split 7-for-1 in 2014. Historical charts generally adjust for this; $80.86/7 is ~$11.55.

Awesome! Thanks

I have some big nostalgia for that hero-banner image -- the pretty blue swooshes. I remember trying to replicate that style, watching hours of 3:2 480p tutorials in Paint.NET and Photoshop CS, so I could have the coolest signature in whatever php web forum I was haunting at the time...

Now this battery icon.

https://www.macrumors.com/2020/06/23/macos-big-sur-battery-h...

Holy cow, that icon is fugly...

I know sometimes new designs need some time to "grow on you". I do not believe this is one of those times.

It's painfully bad enough that I have to assume it will change before release.

It could very likely be a placeholder.

I know Apple can be pretty staid but for a beta I am assuming (and hoping) that they're taking the piss on that.

I suspect that even if it wasn't intended to be a placeholder, after the reaction that icon in particular has gotten across the internet, it's a placeholder now. :)

This one may grow on me, like a tumor.

Yeah, I just got a call from the nineties about it... Guess what?

What's with the spacing of the navigation on the left sidebar? I'm curious if that's just because the window was squeezed small.

Holy cow! I've seen people complaining, but that is so much worse than I could have expected. So strange to come from Apple of all vendors.

This is fairly obviously a placeholder image from a pre-release product.

An image that makes sense and a nice square-ish page makes more sense to me that scrolling forever (sometimes things scrolling over things) for like a handful of words.

I used the wallpaper that looked like this for years. I might give it a shot once again.

Someone recently posted this archive of all past macOS wallpapers in 5K: https://512pixels.net/projects/default-mac-wallpapers-in-5k/

Just to go a little further back, a contemporary TidBits article about the original PPC Macs. https://tidbits.com/1994/03/14/the-power-macintosh-picture/

Some seriously ripe claim chowder on that blog regarding the imminent 25x performance of the PowerPC 620, due in 1996 at the latest!

Lower-power CPU's rising to the occasion to crowd out high end chips is a recurring theme in the industry, but especially for Apple! 620 never got anywhere because the 604 variants were better and then the 603-based 750 (G3) was a lot better. G5 never got anywhere because not the Pentium4, but the Celeron-derived CoreDuo was a lot better! Now abandoning Intel because iPad ARM CPUs are a lot better!

The 603’s were horrible. With the slower cache and I believe they had less cache memory, the 68K emulator crawled. Back then, most of the OS itself was still emulated.

Haha, I'd be more nostalgic if I hadn't bought a 68000-based Mac just before the announcement that Apple was transitioning away from Motorola in the 90’s. Same baloney about releasing additional (Motorola-then / Intel-now) models during the transition. It very quickly became an expensive boat-anchor. I think I was still paying on the loan I'd gotten it since I was a poor college student working auto repair to make ends meet.

I'm excited about the move to the new processor. Also super glad my 2013 MBP has had a good run. It's still totally adequate. 'Course that's a problem isn't it?

It'll be interesting to see how the year turns out for Apple - seems like you'd be nuts to buy an Intel Mac now, right?

You mean PowerPC. Motorola->Power switch is mid-1990s.

Yes, thanks for clarifying!

Just think how pissed you'd be if you just dropped 6k on a new Mac Pro that will be obsoleted in 3 years. Not speaking from experience, no sir.

Apparently Marco from ATP fame did just that.

Marco buys computers like most people buy shoes.

But just because Apple comes out with a computer based on a new processor doesn’t mean your current computer stops working or stops getting updates.

The Apple // line was still getting software updates in 1991 and the Mac was introduced in 1984. Heck Apple sold the //e compatibility card in 1992 for Macs.

Apple supported 68K Macs for five years after the PPC Macs were introduced. They also supported the PPC Macs for either 5 years (10.7 came out in 2011) or 8 years (10.6 wasn’t classified as unsupported until 2014).

I hope to be proven wrong, but I have my doubts that Apple will support Intel beyond a year or at best two after the hardware transition is complete.

I'm sure someone will provide responses to the contrary, but hasn't Apple been pretty good about providing support for quite a reasonable period of time for both their software and hardware? Apple's own recent announcement indicates that they supported various bits of "vintage" hardware (hardware support only) that was first introduced between five and seven years ago: https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT201624

The same KB article indicates that what they consider to be obsolete (not at all supported) is hardware that is about 8 years or older, with most of it being 9+ years since first introduced.

For the most part yes.

Except for the original iPad. That still stings a little. They released it in 2010 and dropped support in 2012. But it was basically unusable with iOS 5 in 2011.

I bought three of the first four iPad models (I was working at a big cellular provider, so I got them at a significantly reduced price) -- each of those early models made substantial performance gains. The fourth model they shipped (the second with the retina screen) was the first one I'd feel comfortable about recommending to friends and family -- it held up well, the screen was unlike anything else on the market at the time, and it didn't weigh a ton.

I'm not sure why anyone would be pissed. If you need the Mac Pro then you're happy because you have a Mac Pro. If you don't need it then why did you buy it in the first place? People don't randomly buy a Lamborghini when what they really want is a Toyota Prius.

That's a terrible analogy, and regardless, buying any of the Intel range of Apple machines today is going to see them being literally incapable of running macOS once Apple decides to dump support. With some work you can run Catalina on a 2008 machine, 12 year old machines can still be coaxed into staying relevant. I expected that a 2019 Mac Pro would last more than (at best) 5 years, but given how Apple treats pros these days I fully expect them to drop Intel support completely in 3-4 years.

PowerPC Macs were able to run the latest MacOS for 4 years, after the announcement, then Apple provided security updates. Your Mac Pro will be a useful device for over a decade, just like my 2009 iMac.

And it’s much more likely that Apple extends this period for x86 than shortens it, given they might not be able to support Windows on Apple Silicon. And because they might need more than 2 years to build Apple Silicon Macs with performance as high as the Kac Pro.

> seems like you'd be nuts to buy an Intel Mac now, right?

Not as bad as yesteryear. Can still run Windows or Linux on it after Apple stops supporting it. Am currently running Ubuntu Mate on an old 2007 iMac given to us for free and it is nicer than expected.

They first announced the PPC transition in 1993. It was at least 3 or 4 years after the PPC Macs were introduced in 1994 that they dropped support for the 68K.

Heck the first version of Office that was PPC only was released in 1999.

Ha, this is cute :) Looks like the Rosetta link still works too: https://www.apple.com/sg/rosetta/. Never really got to try it much, as I didn't really use Macs back then, although I'm curious if anyone from that time knows what the "oah" name stood for.

What do you mean by “oah” name? Where did you see it?

All the Rosetta stuff used to be in a folder at /usr/libexec/oah.

OS(X) Arch Handler is my bet.

`archhandler` was in the name of Rosetta's sysctl variable.

Huh, that would make sense. Thanks!

I believe it's actually "other arch handler", but I can't find that exact string by Googling.

> Pro applications from Apple — including Final Cut Pro, Motion, Soundtrack Pro, DVD Studio Pro, Aperture, Logic Pro, Logic Express, Shake and Final Cut Express — are not supported by Rosetta.

Huh, I wonder why that was.

AltiVec translation IIRC

Those were the showcase programs, and I've heard that Apple didn't want the Rosetta performance hit to impact people's experience with them.

Was it just an artificial blacklist then? Could you hack it?

Even with this one there's some metadata you can set to force it to use rosetta 2 or not. I don't know if there's a way you as the user can force it the other way without hacking the kernel.

There was no need, they had optimised natively compiled versions for Intel so why deal with the Rosetta overhead?

But that’s not helpful for users of older versions. The page makes it sound like there was an upgrade fee in some cases too. I agree it’s a niche use case, but it also seems there’s no reason it shouldn’t work.

* Never really got to try it much, as I didn't really use Macs back then, although I'm curious if anyone from that time knows what the "oah" name stood for.*

I bought my first Mac just after the transition. I remember running Microsoft Office under Rosetta for a while. Office 2008 added Intel support, but it took a while for my university to offer licenses, so I probably used Office 2004 with Rosetta close to a year.

My very first Mac was the very first Intel Mac Mini, I remember at the time disputing getting a PPC Mac Mini instead for software compatibility. I'm glad I didn't. I was a long time Windows fanboy and that Mac Mini converted me.

That machine is still kicking, my dad was using it for web browsing until earlier this year. Firefox was for a long time the only modern browser he could use, and then even that stopped supporting 32 bit Macs.

I have the first Intel Mac Mini still running for my parents, and it runs the latest Firefox really well on 32-bit Debian. I set them up with a macOS theme on Plasma Desktop and the only difference that they seemed to notice is that their computer became much faster.

You can upgrade the machine with a Core 2 Duo processor for about $4 if you really want to keep it running forever.

The G4 Mac Mini was the slowest new computer I’ve ever owned. It was barely usable for anything.

It's now possible to install OS 9 on it thanks to some clever hacking. It's a speed demon.

What's the hardware support like?

I used one for desktop publishing at a company when they first launched.

Pagemaker and Quark ran like a regular at the heart attack grill trying to do a marathon.

When we upgraded to a Mac Pro upon launch it was like a whole new world of possibilities had opened up.

Funny enough. This was my fourth and final personal Mac [1]. I installed Windows 7 on it and gave it to my mom. She is still using it as a “guest” computer when she tutors. It’s running like a charm 14 years later. I installed Office 365 on it, but most of her students just use Google Docs with Chrome.

[1] not that I have anything against Macs, but I don’t use my personal computer for much of anything anymore. A cheap Windows laptop is good enough. I use my iPad/iPhone for everything I do personally.

"Transition accomplished"

I miss the days when Apple's taglines were always witty (they're still sometimes witty, but not consistently so.)

Agree with this. Apple marketing copy back in the day had a big impact on my personal writing style. It does seem like they started doing it again on some of the copy for the newest OS though.

I don’t get the wit in this one. Would you mind explaining?

I assume it was targeted at the G. Bush "Mission Accomplished" banner regarding winning in Iraq ... in 2003.

Pun on “mission accomplished”

The subtitles are also "The new Mac core", "Four on the floor", and "Dual-roar", which rhyme.

Four on the floor is also a type of manual transmission system in vehicles (4 gears, shifter on the floor). Additionally, as I just learned, it also has meaning in music

Disco Mac.

Or marching band.

"Four on the floor" makes an appearance in the Beach Boys' "Little Deuce Coupe"

    She's got a competition clutch with the four on the floor
    And she purrs like a kitten till the lake pipes roar
    And if that ain't enough to make you flip your lid
    There's one more thing, I got the pink slip daddy

I had no idea what Lake Pipes were:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exhaust_system#Lake_pipes

And in "Go Grease Lightning" from the film Grease (I shouldn't admit to knowing this).

    A fuel injection cutoff and chrome plated rods oh yeah (I'll get the money I'll kill to get the money)

    With a four speed on the floor they'll be waiting at the door

    You know that ain't no shit we'll be getting lots of tit

    In Grease Lightning

From the days when 2 cores on a chip was impressive:) (And it was!)

Now I have a 12 core cpu in my desktop wondering if I should have got the 16 core one.

The future is an amazing place to live:D

Meanwhile, the Ghz have barely budged an inch! They even seem to have gone down in some cases! ;)

Even if Ghz haven't changed, IPC is much higher so you'll still see huge increases in single-thread performance!

Don't worry, Electron will take care of that increase.

Back in the days when Macs were #1 and the iPhone was a figment of Steve's imagination.

By 2005, the iPhone was definitely in development.

The iPad was, for sure, the iPhone is a spinoff from the iPad project.

Since the iPhone was released in 2007 and the iPad in 2010, I’m going to suggest your timeline is backwards.

The iPad development supposedly started before the iPhone even though it was released after.

"Jobs later said that Apple had begun developing the iPad before the iPhone.[27][28]"

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IPad#History

Yeah, they'd messed with a clunky tablet for years. Then they finally developed a glass display that scrolled with touch and thought, "This would be better in a phone." I don't know if that really qualifies the iPhone as a "spinoff" of the Folio, or the Folio as even a predecessor to the iPad.

Folio was going to ship, but Jobs canceled it because it wasn’t good enough yet but let the team adapt it to a phone.

And I worked on the Pen Mac about fifteen years prior, so with that and Newton, Apple was working on the concept forever.

Upvoted you since you probably didn’t know and I didn’t want to see you buried for not knowing something, but Jobs did talk about how iPhones were a spin-off from an internal tablet project. At some point Apple realized that the tech they were developing for tablets would also work really well in a phone, and they shifted priorities to making a phone first.

As I understand it, a semi regular dinner guest that worked at Microsoft, the husband of his wife’s friend or something like that, came around with a Windows tablet PC after they hit the market and was talking about how great it was and Apple didn’t have anything like this. Jobs saw it for the crap it was (touchscreen Windows was pretty bad back then) and to shut this guy up, put together a team at Apple to work on developing tablets. This was the project that would eventually spawn iPhones and later, iPads.

There were rumors about “the true video iPod” by mid 2005 based on patent filings - a touch screen iPod that was 3.5 inches. People didn’t know back then that they were really getting leaks about the iPhone. The earliest mention I can find via a quick Google search is this.

https://www.theregister.com/2006/02/09/apple_readies_video_i...

"Virtual clickwheel"

Clearly wasn't a very accurate source. Unless apple did actually consider adding it at one point.

Doesn’t that sound like a way to replace the mechanical wheel with a touchscreen?

The UI was easy to change. But the form factor abd the size of the screen (3.5 inches), was pretty much spot on. What are the chances that the rumor mill would get the size just right two years before the iPhone was announced if it Apple hadn’t already basically decided on a form factor by then?

Even with the iPad, the first interface ideas were to just have a big iPhone interface with no accordances to the larger screen. (Source: various interviews of former employees on the Debug podcast).

So what is the future of Hackintosh?

Probably secure for the next couple years as Apple continues supporting their current Intel lineup. After that, perhaps we'll have more Corelliums pop up.

https://web.archive.org/web/20200709070612/https://www.apple...

There seems to be quite a few of those remnants on the apple.com site, every few months I feel like I see one of these links for old school content and themes :)

This was a real blast from the past. I got my first Mac a little after the switch and i remember reading through a lot of these pages back in the day.

I really miss the old days when there was no real concept of data collection, not big ad-tech companies pissing over a good set of goods and services, just pure tools that worked (and sometimes they didn't).

What happened, humans?

Those humans won some battles but lost the war. Need new people to fork known-good points on that timeline, using open protocols and code.

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2020/02/gopher-when-adversaria...

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23042424

Where can I get one of these sweet looking number crunchers?

Craigslist

Thanks. I have a more recent model, so I'm actually good.

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