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Comment by addaon | Hacker News Reader

6502 -> 680x0 -> PPC601 -> x86 -> x86_64 -> ARMv8.5 (Apple M1)

The original Intel Mac's ran the 32-bit Core Duo, although a mid-season refresh took them to the (64-bit) Core 2 Duo. That generation of purely-32-bit hardware being out in the wild had some real impact on moving the OS forward, later down the road.

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I completely forgot about the Core Duo Mac Mini!

We had purchased one, when 10.5 released. And it died shortly after to be replaced by the Core 2 Duo Mac Mini. The x86 era was so short I barely remembered it.

Hey don't forget the poor old Apple ///, Apple //e, and Apple //GS! ;)

6502 -> 6502B -> 65C02 -> 65C816 -> 680x0 -> PPC601 -> x86 -> x86_64 -> ARMv8.5 (Apple M1)

Beat me to it!

Also probably worth dividing PPC into the 32-bit architectures (601, 603, G3, G4) and 64-bit architectures (G5), although the PowerPC architecture did that transition in such a civilized manner that it wasn't really traumatic. In some ways the jump from the 601 (Power-ish) to 603 (true PowerPC) was bigger than the jump from the G4 to the G5.

They also never fully went 64-bit on PPC, so there was never really a transition there, just some 64-bit machines that could do some slightly different things and I don't think there was ever a full 64-bit version of OS X for PPC. So there weren't any huge painful breaks.

Good points. Worth noting that PPC -> x86 was a 64 bit to 32 bit transition.

I assume we will soon see ARMv8 -> ARMv9, but that will hardly be noticeable.

I owned the first MacBook Pro but it died before the architecture became an issue :(

Overall Apple should be good at architecture transitions by now as they've done enough of them!

Also the jump from 68000 and 68010 to 68020-030-040 had a similar transition (if anyone remembers having to worry about wether your software/system was 32 bit clean)

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