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Comment by PeterStuer | Hacker News Reader

I used to write on a IIcx with an Apple 'Page" display and Word 3.0. Honestly, while I have left the Mac platform since the PowerPC disaster, that writing setup was very comfortable and would still be if you would focus on a pure single tasking word-processing task.

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What was disastrous about the PowerPC? Sure, they eventually moved on to x86, but I don’t think PPC itself really caused big problems. Apple was already in serious trouble at that point; PPC on its own didn’t save them but at least it didn’t kill them.

The early PPC Macs were good machines, and the brief flirtation with licensed clones at least allowed me to buy a Mac-compatible computer (Power 100) that I wouldn’t otherwise have been able to afford.

> What was disastrous about the PowerPC?

The G4 was amazing, but right from the start Motorola couldn't get acceptable yields on the higher-clock versions, and that kept happening. The IBM-sourced G5 was a power hog that was clearly not meant to be a consumer CPU.

The first computer I owned was a G4 Power Mac, I ordered with the student discount the day after it was announced. I got the middle 400MHz version. Apple was forced to abandon the high-end 450MHz version shortly after launch.

If Motorola could have manufactured the G4 according to plan, Apple probably never would have switched to Intel.

I lived through that era and I’m pretty sure they launched with 400, 450 and 500Mhz. After getting back ordered and not being able to fill demand for the high end configurations they dropped the clock speeds to 350, 400 and 450Mhz. Imagine the shitstorm that would be stirred up today if Apple dropped the specs of a Mac or iPhone after launch.

Yes, this is accurate. We purchased the 500 MHz at launch and then it got delayed for several months. I believe we were offered to downgrade to a 450 or wait it out, and we waited it out.

Thanks for reminding me! I did get the 450MHz version.

The transition was the disaster. The first gen PowerPC Macs performed significantly less running common user applications, while costing a premium. This was a software issue, but left a very sour taste and many, including me, transitioned to Wintel as a result.

It depends on what you did. Photoshop wasn’t fully recompiled at first but they did get key performance tasks written to a PPC plug-in running inside 68k emulated Photoshop.

And it screamed. Faster than anything before it.

The fact that emulated 68k code could call native PPC was nuts to me but it was how most of the classic OS worked on PPC, with native parts being slowly rewritten over time.

I doubt there's benchmarks from ye olde days, but are you sure? I thought the first PPC machines managed to outrun 68040 machines, even in emulation. I fully admit my recollection could be wrong there.

But regardless, that entire pre-G3 era was the nadir of the platform. Those were dark days.

It was surprisingly similar to the current ARM transition if I’m remembering correctly. Many, but not all applications actually ran faster even in emulation. But there were certain tasks that didn’t emulate well and the pundits cautioned to wait to upgrade until the tools you used were fully ported.

I don't remember anything that bad either. They didn't fit the thermal requirements of laptops that well, but even the G4 with Altivec was plenty fine for many things.

The Intel move still made lots of sense, but that didn't make PPC unuseable.

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