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Comment by PaulHoule | Hacker News Reader

Fourth life.

   68k -> PPC -> Intel -> M1

Other computing ecosystems that still exist since 1984 (x86, zArchitecture) maintained binary compatibly. Apple's the only company that has survived more than one ISA change.

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I recall PPC -> Intel revitalizing Apple's position in the computer space, did the 68k to PPC have a similar effect?

68k was just plain dying, even Motorola gave up on it. Like the DEC VAX the ISA was such that they could not see a competitive roadmap for the 1990s.

All the vendors that were using 68k either switched (Sun Microsystems, Apple) or went out of business (Amiga, Atari).

The PPC Macs were really nice though and even gave decent performance running 68k apps because they had a good emulator even then.

By the mid-2000s I think PPC had a good story for servers and workstations and even game consoles (Wii, Xbox 360 and PS3 all used some kind of custom PPC) but I think Apple wanted to make laptops and PPC was not power efficient for that. That was around peak Intel where AMD shocked them out of their complacency and before "we're number one why try harder?" set in again.

Fifth if we count Mac OS -> Mac OS X

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