I don't think they're exactly comparable. Ditching PPC (and I was working at Apple at this time) was a bold move. The existing Apple loyal user base -- which Jobs wisely knew was irrelevant -- loved having a "different" "Supercomputer" CPU at the heart of their computer instead of the "slow-as-a-snail" Intel. Jobs knew it was better to appeal to the rest of the world than be true to the "true believers" -- who would have been happy with OS9, too. But it was taking a risk:
To the True Believers it didn't matter that by this time ~2003, Intel was fast and much more power efficient. You'd be lucky to get 40 minutes of battery life from a PowerPC based Mac laptop at the time when Intel laptops could run for a few hours.
Today, Apple doesn't have a core group of users who are "proud" of their unique CPUs, and isn't fighting an uphill battle as they were in 2003-2005 or so. However, sometimes they choose a tech for "stubborn" reasons rather than technical ones and it's not clear if the ARM decision is made for the right reasons. For example: I think not choosing NVidia, especially for the Mac Pro, was a big mistake and costs them customers.
>I think not choosing NVidia, especially for the Mac Pro, was a big mistake and costs them customers.
Apple's reluctance to use Nvidia has been a total head scratcher. I owned a 2011 with Nvidia dedicated GPU, but this was the line with known manufacturing defects. I had the mainboard replaced twice because of this issue, but eventually replaced the laptop when the GPU failed again. It's like Apple is holding a grudge.
It's also due to Nvidia's unwillingness to collaborate. AMD allows Apple to maintain their own fork of AMD's drivers for macOS. From what I've heard, AMD also keeps a handful of engineers on premises at Apple campus to assist with work on this fork.
Presumably, Apple wants the same from Nvidia, but Nvidia is notoriously secretive and protective and wants exclusive control over drivers for its hardware.
It's easy to pin this on Apple, but Nvidia's lack of openness shows in FOSS too — where AMD has open sourced the Linux version of their GPU drivers, making AMD GPUs work great out of the box with Linux and allowing for the drivers to follow along with the latest in desktop Linux developments (Wayland, etc), Nvidia has stubbornly insisted on keeping their drivers closed, making for a frustrating install experience, and has actively impeded the development and adoption of Wayland.
The true-believers didn't matter because they were a cult.
I have a family member in the Cult of Apple. Up to the day of the announcement, you would hear him talk about how amazing PowerPC was, Risc vs Cisc, etc.
From the day apple anounced the move to Intel and on, he did a 180, talking about how smart Apple was to switch, how modern Cisc was really just a frontend to a Risc processor anyways, etc.
> a bold move. The existing Apple loyal user base -- which Jobs wisely knew was irrelevant -- loved having a "different" "Supercomputer" CPU at the heart of their computer instead of the "slow-as-a-snail" Intel. Jobs knew it was better to appeal to the rest of the world than be true to the "true believers"
... there were no 'true believers' in PPC only 'true believers' in Apple. They argued "slow-as-a-snail" Intel because that's what Jobs/Apple had been arguing for a half a decade. There was little risk in that appeal; once Jobs said switch there were no holdouts for PPC chips or threatening to jumpship. There was more risk in showing Bill Gates at Macworld than moving to Intel and the crowd merely booed then hopped on board.
And in general, computing have been hidden under one or two more layers. In the early 90s, architecture/OS made a difference (strength, platforms, available software). Nowadays .. everything is so powerful and so similar, and so much is crossplatform.
> "if you're actually using the PowerBook, a charge won't last nearly that long. Apple claims that the battery life is 3 hours and 45 minutes for a combination of wireless Web browsing and editing a text document, but only 2 hours and 15 minutes for DVD playback."
Also DVD decoding was an edge case — spinning up an extra drive and expensive decoding until the hardware, drivers, and OS all supported direct hardware decoding — which was relevant to people on planes but almost nowhere else in normal life.
> To the True Believers it didn't matter that by this time ~2003, Intel was fast and much more power efficient. You'd be lucky to get 40 minutes of battery life from a PowerPC based Mac laptop at the time when Intel laptops could run for a few hours.
You’re calling people True Believers and then just making things up like a period flame-warrior. I supported both at the time and there really wasn’t a significant difference in battery – both could last around 6 hours in light usage, especially since if you disabled Flash, or 3-4 for things like developers or scientists.
> "if you're actually using the PowerBook, a charge won't last nearly that long. Apple claims that the battery life is 3 hours and 45 minutes for a combination of wireless Web browsing and editing a text document, but only 2 hours and 15 minutes for DVD playback."
This is actually a quote from MacWorld, which was always charitable to the platform.
In actual use as a developer doing compiles, I often got less than an hour. I was working at Apple during this time. I know.
So you’re moving from your previous statement of “you’d be lucky to get 40 minutes” to “a few hours”?
Again, I heavily used both supporting a number of daily users. I’m not saying that the situation was anywhere near acceptable by modern standards but there just wasn’t such a huge difference between platforms: nobody had hardware which would run 100% CPU for a full day but light use (web development, system administration) would get you at least half a day. The one exception to that were the PC laptops which had multiple batteries but that’s because they had 2-3x battery capacity rather than a huge disparity in processor efficiency.
Not a fan of the rumored platform switch, but I tend to think the vast majority of Apple's Mac users, who aren't power users/techies, care more about the Apple hardware quality/design and OS than the CPU platform that Macs run on.
I think you're probably right, but there is a mix of both. I'm actually super interested in the platform switch. I can't wait to see what Apple does with arm, and how the differences between arm and Intel change things on laptops.
To the True Believers it didn't matter that by this time ~2003, Intel was fast and much more power efficient. You'd be lucky to get 40 minutes of battery life from a PowerPC based Mac laptop at the time when Intel laptops could run for a few hours.
Today, Apple doesn't have a core group of users who are "proud" of their unique CPUs, and isn't fighting an uphill battle as they were in 2003-2005 or so. However, sometimes they choose a tech for "stubborn" reasons rather than technical ones and it's not clear if the ARM decision is made for the right reasons. For example: I think not choosing NVidia, especially for the Mac Pro, was a big mistake and costs them customers.