Having lived through that time period and been an avid Apple watcher I can say it wasn't performance of the 68k or PPC processors that caused Apple to go through the hard times of the late 1990s. 90% of Apple's problems were self inflicted and due to poor execution. Between 1994 and 1998 Apple's quality control was absolutely terrible. - There were crap products like the Performa 5200 - There were borderline unusable OS releases like Mac OS 7.5.2 - just so buggy! Their software engineering was bad - the Copland project was a death march that would never be released. Apple middle managers were empire building. Apple's sales discipline was bad. Their sales team was channel stuffing - cramming the sales channel full of product that then was given back to Apple because it wasn't selling - forcing the company to take write downs. Sales was doing this so they they could meet their quotas and get their bonuses for the year. The leadership wasn't very tech savvy and would make weird product decisions. Like the motherboard design of the afore mentioned 5200. They had a latop with a screen so heavy it couldn't stand up without tipping over backwards (not released). All these problems were destroying their brand too Having bought products from Apple during the later 90s the performance was great! The quality sucked. The OS crashed multiple times a day - the hardware would randomly fail. Keeping stuff working was possible but you can to know the deep magic of how to get a machine stable. Most people gave up. I also fondly remember the PPC 601, PPC 603e and PPC 604e. They were insanely fast for the time. Better IPC than anything Intel had and higher clocks too - up to 50% faster. The G3 chips were great too. The G3 had a fantastic L2 cache system - a backside cache with its own dedicated bus. Steve did a good job of spinning that advantage into a compelling line of products. (unlike Amelio or even worse Spindler) Gil Amelio did a fantastic job of fixing the core management dysfunction, fixing the horrible quality issues and buying NeXT. Amelio also did a great job finding creditors and cash to keep the lights on at Apple. In my opinion Amelio doesn't get nearly enough credit. Then Steve came on the scene with a compelling product vision and kept the Mac alive long enough to make other stuff like the iPod and iPhone. Also, PowerPC wasn't abandoned because of power/heat issues. It was more the cost of producing new processors for such a small number of machines was going up tremendously. This was around the time that the number of different instruction sets out there went from over a dozen to just X86 and ARM (ARM being another Apple financed venture btw). The thing that *made* the modern Apple wasn't the Macintosh. It was stuff like the iPod and iPhone. Mac is tiny piece of Apple now.
I also think thay Amelio has done a great job as apple ceo, everybody hates on him, but he solved many problems behind the curtains, but he didn't took the line-up head on, steve slashed the confusing product line almost entirely, but if it wasn't for Amelio, steve wouldn't be back at apple in the first place. And i think the time of the Mac has come, not as like the end, but rather the beginning, since the transition to ARM, mac sales are growing again, they are the true follow up to the powerpc macs, i never liked the idea of an intel chip inside of a mac, it felt wrong, though it was a good descision at the time, but what i learned afterwards is that apple was using intel chips all along! The first Airport base station ran on a custom intel pentium based chip, i was stunned to learn about this because nobody talks about it! I hung on to my powerbook g4 for the longest time because i wouldn't want to accept the fact that intel was better, but i bought a macbook pro in 2012 and is still my current model today, ok it natively doesn't run monterey, but i got it working on it :) apple had quite the journey, from almost being bankrupt, to one of the most valueable brands in the world today, very impressive i must admit!
So many people leave paragraph after paragraphs of comments on your channel. You're gonna get your million subscribers before you know it. I absolutely love this channel and will make sure that I turn on as many people to it as I can. Just brilliant...
I still have several PowerPC macs in my house to this day! A powermac g3, a blue imac g3, a blue and tangerine ibook g3, a powerbook g3, a couple of powerbook g4s and an ibook g4. I withnessed the move from 68k to powerpc, i had a macintosh classic when i was a kid and when i eventually moved to an ibook g3 years later, everybody around me told me that i had a cool looking laptop (i had the special edition ibook g3), but what they didn't know was that my ibook performed way faster than their pentium 2 and 3 laptops, and intel chips of that day were power hungry! Look at apple's keynote where they introduced the white ibook g3, 6 hours of batterylife against 2.5 hours of a at the time powerfull Dell laptop, and even worse, the compaq armada model with pentium 3, only getting 1.5 hours of batterylife! My ibook was a beast, powering most of the day without even thinking about a powerplug, but everybody who had a pentium based machine, was looking around for a wall socket! 2 things killed the powerpc lineup, the G5, because it was so power hungry and hot that a laptop with a g5 in it was out of the question, and the other called Pentium M, a high performance, low power chip derived from the P3! Which is ironic since in the g3 days, it was vice versa :p
Dude, I just found his latest on the CRAY progression and I can't believe that he came from such humble beginnings. I'm going through every video he has in reverse chronological order and liking and commenting and all that stuff I'm hopes that RU-vids algorithm will pull it's head out of its ass and make this young chap go viral. If he doesn't have a million subscribers by the end of '24, I'm writing a hand written letter to the RU-vid execs in protest. 😆
The PowerPC CPUs, like the G3 and the G4 used in Apple Macs of the time, were far ahead of the equivalent Intel CPUs, in both performance and performance/watt. However, the Apple-IBM-Motorola backed consortium was unable to keep pace with Intel’s rapid pace of development of development of the x86 CPU. Intel designed and rapidly released successive generations of x86 CPUs that outpaced the languishing PowerPC CPUs in terms of performance and performance/watt. It became obvious to Apple that it could no longer depend upon the development of PowerPC CPUs to keep up with the pace of development of the x86 CPU set by Intel. A combination of the latest Intel x86 CPUs handily beating the best PowerPC CPUs of the time (in both performance and performance/watt) and the lack of an innovative and timely roadmap for further development of the PowerPC, Apple (under CEO Steve Jobs) announced in 2005 that Apple would transition from using PowerPC CPUs to using the industry leading Intel x86 CPUs to ensure that the Mac lineup of computers would continue to remain competitive against Windows backed PCs, in both performance and performance/watt.
That was definitely a motivator, but also the fact that laptops were a significant growth area and the performance-per-watt of the upcoming designs was pretty mediocre.
Hey I like your videos, I think if you used no video of your self and rather used more pics/graphics your videos might feel more professional and less ascosiated with the speaker as well as more focused on the content, just an opinion thanks for the videos
+andrew ordonez I respectfully disagree. If you watch a space documentary or any documentary the person being interview is shown on screen between segments. Btw, good channel TechKnowledge Video, I subbed.
Unix saved Apple. It was also highly portable between many types of CPU architectures that allowed them to save tons of development money on porting the OS. Apples prototype OS Copland is known as the biggest software development failure in history. This lead Apple to a situation were they had a terrible OS (System7-9) and forced to buy an OS, their choices was between BeOS or the Unix based NEXT, NEXT had the additional bonus of adding Steve back to the company. Apple went with NEXT and Be faded into history. Good video man, do more. I'd like to see maybe some talk about Sun Microsystems as I see them as probably the most innovative computer company ever (with the worst marketing department ever).
