Item — HN Reader

> Apple has never pulled off a transition like this before. None of your examples involved going from a popular architecture with broad software support to a less-popular architecture.

That's exactly what the 68K-to-PowerPC transition was: Going from a widely used architecture (Mac, Amiga, ST, and others) to a brand new one.

1 comments

I think 68K and PowerPC were both clearly much more of a dead end when they were abandoned than Intel is today.

Also, I don't recall stories of Macs being able to dual boot AmigaOS, and there was nothing like virtualization in those days. There were emulators, I guess. All of those other platforms were less common than Windows is today.

And there was never any threat that they would enforce sandboxing and code signing like a lot of people speculate for ARM Macs.

It really does sound like the ARM Macs are going to be less capable. It would be nice if that turns out incorrect but it's sure the way it looks.

> Also, I don't recall stories of Macs being able to dual boot AmigaOS

They weren't. Amiga 68K systems had significantly different system architecture from Apple 68K systems, most notably in terms of their graphics and audio hardware.

> and there was nothing like virtualization in those days.

Weeelll... there were some special-purpose tools, but they were much more special-purpose than anything we call "virtualization" today. The Amiga version of Basilisk II [1] ran 68K code directly on the host processor, for instance. Later on, there were tools like Mac-On-Linux [2] which would run PowerPC MacOS on a PowerPC Linux system.

[1]: https://basilisk.cebix.net/

[2]: http://mac-on-linux.sourceforge.net/

PowerPC was far from a dead-end technology when it was announced. They had a very ambitious road map and were responsive to customer needs.

At the time of the announcements, there were G5s in the towers and G4s in the laptops. One of the big problem was, how to put G5 into laptop, as it was too power hungry and produced too much heat, and Motorola with IBM were not going to do anything about it. Moto went out of the PPC business and IBM was focusing on the servers.

Ergo, it was dead end for Apple products.