June 6, 2005: Steve Jobs says Apple switching to Intel & dashing hopes for G5 Powerbook

[sekker]

Lew Zealand wrote:
It was clearly the best Mac decision for Apple as the Core Duo offered way more performance than even the G5 and immediately could be used in both desktops and laptops, achieving parity in one decision. Core 2 Duo extended that lead less than year later and Core i# 2 years after that. Huge leaps in performance which was unavailable from the PPC side of things.

Apple should consider adding AMD Ryzen CPUs nowadays but they'll probably go with their own A# chips in the long run.

Don't forget, the nearly flawless Rosetta emulation by the startup Apple acquired to make the software transition happen. PPC to Intel was far smoother than transition from Motorola chips to PPC.

There is real legacy found inside modern Intel chips due to PPC proving the RISC architecture advantages. We will see whether Intel learns from ARM, or whether we are talking about Apple going Intel for 'Pro' Macs and ARM for 'consumer' Macs.

[JoeH]

sekker wrote:
Don't forget, the nearly flawless Rosetta emulation by the startup Apple acquired to make the software transition happen. PPC to Intel was far smoother than transition from Motorola chips to PPC.

Apple did not acquire the startup, they just licensed the technology to create Rosetta. Part of the reason for Rosetta not being included in OS X after 10.5 is that IBM acquired Transitive Corporation in 2009. You could retain the existing Rosetta installation in 10.6 when upgrading, and due to complaints it could be added via Software Update to fresh installs of 10.6. Not available or supported in 10.7 and above.