Did anyone else feel hoodwinked when the Intel switch was announced ?

[nathansz]

There is a reason why keyboard shortcuts are as popular as they are in OSX

The same reason they are in windows. Because lifting your hands off the keyboard is inefficient

There is a reason why those who can hit 17 on that test in Windows struggle to get to 12-15 on OSX under otherwise-identical conditions.

So if I got 18 first try in macOS what will I get in windows on the same computer with the same mouse?

Also, who are those that can hit 17 in windows and 12-15 OSX?

Just you?

 

[bunnspecial]

The same reason they are in windows. Because lifting your hands off the keyboard is inefficient

Actually, if I'm not mistaken(and don't hold me to this) there are probably more keyboard shortcuts available in Windows than in Macs.

Windows did not require a mouse until relatively recent versions. IIRC, even XP didn't have a mouse as an official requirement. Because of that, there's a way to do nearly everything through the keyboard.

Macs, from the System .95 days, were designed around the idea of the mouse and keyboard working together for the best user experience. The old Macintosh Human Interface guide use to be around out there on the internet, although I couldn't locate it having a quick look now.

As you said, though, often a keyboard shortcut is just the more efficient way to do something regardless of how great both the mouse itself and your individual mouse skills are. Let's say I'm typing a document and need to insert a subscript and/or superscript, something that I routinely do multiple times a day. I can do it one of two ways. If I'm typing along in Word and ready to insert, I can do it one of two ways. I can take my right hand off the keyboard, move the cursor up to click on the appropriate button in the toolbar(which fortunately is easy to find), type what I need to type, and then go back up to the toolbar and hit that same button again. Alternatively, I can hit command+=(or command+shift+=), type what I need to type, then hit the same button combination again. If I were to time both tecnniques, I suspect I'd find I was over and done with it and ready to go on typing the rest of the document when using keyboard shortcuts in less time than it wold take me to have my hand re-positioned on the keyboard to start typing if I used the toolbar button. BTW, I THINK Alt+= does the same thing in Windows, but don't hold me to that-I just know that the shortcut is there.

Looking up a shortcut for a task you only do rarely may not make sense, but if it's something you do regularly, knowing and using the shortcut can save you a ton of time, and as you said this is system independent. I think people who are trying to do actual work on their computers, not spending their time on mouse pointing games or timing how long it takes to scroll down a web page, can appreciate this.

 

[B S Magnet]

Macs, from the System .95 days, were designed around the idea of the mouse and keyboard working together for the best user experience. The old Macintosh Human Interface guide use to be around out there on the internet, although I couldn't locate it having a quick look now.

Please don’t ask why, but I already had this browser tab open.

 

[Dronecatcher]

There is a reason why those who can hit 17 on that test in Windows struggle to get to 12-15 on OSX under otherwise-identical conditions.

You have read my results in my previous post?

 

[B S Magnet]

Returning (somewhat) to the topic:

I felt a bit hoodwinked by arguing with a rando whose post-to-reaction ratio was 0.049 (and tanking) about pointer acceleration on a topic discussing the PowerPC-to-Intel transition. :|

 

[txa1265]

NeXTStep/OpenStep, after all, was already built for MIPS/Intel architecture, so the foundational work to maintain a side-build, as a contingency, was probably always in place once Jobs took up Apple’s reins.

I had a Toshiba laptop running NeXTStep for Intel for optical measurement analysis software about 25 years ago ... and it was wonderful. Really cool shifting to OSX after that and seeing so many similarities!

 

[B S Magnet]

I had a Toshiba laptop running NeXTStep for Intel for optical measurement analysis software about 25 years ago ... and it was wonderful. Really cool shifting to OSX after that and seeing so many similarities!

It’s really a thing to see NeXTStep be ported into Rhapsody, then Rhapsody become OS X Server 1.0, then OS X Server 1.0 take on the Aqua interface with the Kodiak public beta for OS X in 2000.

At the time, the average Mac user or even computer user wasn’t privy to this transition the way we, in retrospect, can be now.

 

[wonderings]

I remember when they first announced the switch to Intel and all the benefits that would come. I was using a Dual G4 Tower at the time and had a Dual G5 at home. Love those computers and think the G4 powermacs and G5 powermacs had the best cases even to this day. G4 is more dated, but the simplicity of opening it up and everything was just there was amazing!

I would not say I felt hoodwinked but I was questioning a little all the talk before on how PowerPC chips were so much better and then to hear they were switching, was a bit of a mixed message... for a brief amount of time. The flexibility that the move to Intel brought was fantastic, the ability to run Windows natively or virtually, as well as other OS's was fantastic. Even now with my M1 Max, I feel that a Mac is much more of a Swiss Army knife type of tool, I can do so many things, quickly and easily that I can't do on the Windows platform. Speaking specifically of virtual machines. Parallels has made this so slick and simple, it looks so archaic when I go onto a Windows computer with VM's,

 

[GMShadow]

On topic, at least the late PPC hardware generally saw some nice improvements for the final generation - the multicore Power Mac G5's, the better graphics in the iBooks and iMacs, the Hi-Res PowerBooks. Really only the eMac and the poor 12" PowerBook got the shaft.

 

[headlessmike]

I bought the last iBook G4 in August 2005, two months after the switch to Intel was announced, so I knew it was going to happen. I think that everybody was surprised that Apple released the new hardware as early as they did however. I was never dissapointed though. That iBook got me through my first years at university and actually had better software support that Intel Macs for the physics courses I was taking for several years after the transition. I eventually picked up one of the last white Core 2 Duo MacBooks to replace my iBook, which was my first Intel computer since my old 286. Replacing a computer within 4 years was completely normal back then, so I didn't feel like I was cheated out of any longevity with my iBook.

A few years ago I picked up a PowerBook G4 to play around with. It's immediately clear how much of a performance boost the transition to Intel was at the time. But I'm pretty sure that I could still get most of my work done on that machine even today, some things would just take about ten times longer than they do on my ARM Macs.

 

[GMShadow]

I bought the last iBook G4 in August 2005, two months after the switch to Intel was announced, so I knew it was going to happen. I think that everybody was surprised that Apple released the new hardware as early as they did however. I was never dissapointed though. That iBook got me through my first years at university and actually had better software support that Intel Macs for the physics courses I was taking for several years after the transition. I eventually picked up one of the last white Core 2 Duo MacBooks to replace my iBook, which was my first Intel computer since my old 286. Replacing a computer within 4 years was completely normal back then, so I didn't feel like I was cheated out of any longevity with my iBook.

A few years ago I picked up a PowerBook G4 to play around with. It's immediately clear how much of a performance boost the transition to Intel was at the time. But I'm pretty sure that I could still get most of my work done on that machine even today, some things would just take about ten times longer than they do on my ARM Macs.

That’s another point that sometimes makes a modern comparison difficult - with replacement cycles back then, a lot of PPC Mac users were in the market for a new Mac by the time Apple was dropping software support, even excluding the third party exodus, because 5ish years was a typical lifecycle. What would have been hampered was resale, or keeping it around as a second machine, or handing it down to another member of the family.

 

[za9ra22]

A few years ago I picked up a PowerBook G4 to play around with. It's immediately clear how much of a performance boost the transition to Intel was at the time. But I'm pretty sure that I could still get most of my work done on that machine even today, some things would just take about ten times longer than they do on my ARM Macs.

You would expect this of course, since even absent a change in processor architecture, systems gained power and performance exponentially. Moore's Law - or the practical consequence of it at least.

Admittedly, I'm a regular user of old computers, including Macs, so their performance and limitations aren't unfamiliar, but I went back to one of my favorites, a 17-inch G4 PowerBook for a dose of self-reminding, and was pleasantly surprised how well it performed on some fairly complex tasks, including video and photo editing. That was using software which was entirely appropriate for the age of the system. Which also means that while the M1 MacBook I'm using right now is much faster in absolute terms, on a task-for-task comparison between then-current software on the G4, and now-current software on the M1, there isn't the vast difference. We've just made software more 'powerful' to eat up the processor cycles!

At the time of the Intel transition however, when the software was pretty much the same between before and after, the performance change was, I think, more notable. It seems so to me when comparing the last of the G4 and first of the Intel laptops. I can see why new purchasers of the PPC machines might have been very upset by the seemingly sudden switch.

 

[Basic75]

That could have changed with Cell

Cell was in no way a good processor for a laptop. It wasn't even a good processor for the Playstation because the single PPE wasn't a lot of horsepower. Sure, the 8 SPEs had a lot of number crunching performance, but were a nightmare to develop for. General purpose computing really needs a cache coherent uniform address space and a homogeneous ISA. It might have worked as an accelerator similar to how we do GPGPU today. That might actually be fun, can we attach a Cell to a modern Mac via Thunderbolt? The PPE might be fast enough for a G4 class Mac, like a better emulator.

 

[mode11]

Apple has done a great job over the years playing a game of Frogger across the processor space-- hopping from one to the next at just the right moment to avoid going splat.

LOL. They backed a series of wrong horses until they finally got with x86. When a new generation of 68K/PPC dropped they'd sometimes enjoy a brief window of being ahead, before x86 inevitably steamrolled past. The key thing to bear in mind is that whilst the top Macs were sometimes faster than PCs, they were bloody expensive. As 'bad' as the Pentium 4 was, a cheap 3GHz P4 was likely faster at most things than a G5.

Having started my Mac journey with a 400MHz G4, I switched to a P4 / XP in the early years of dog-slow OSX, and only returned to the Mac with Tiger / Intel. A big part of the appeal was that with the hardware 'rivalry' finally over, Macs would now have lasting parity with the PC market. With the latest transition, Apple can at least leverage their impressive smartphone technology (which comes with certain related drawbacks); it will be interesting to see if they can maintain their PPW lead on x86 long term though.

I say this as someone with a bunch of PPC Macs (a Cube, TiBook, QS G4, Pismo etc.) that I love as collector's pieces.

 

[Dronecatcher]

As 'bad' as the Pentium 4 was, a cheap 3GHz P4 was likely faster at most things than a G5.

Benchmarks say otherwise.

In the mid noughties I was using a Dual G5 alongside a Dual Xeon Dell Precision Workstation - they seemed pretty well matched for speed but the Windows experience was 'clunkier.'

 

[Amethyst1]

As 'bad' as the Pentium 4 was, a cheap 3GHz P4 was likely faster at most things than a G5.

Benchmarks say otherwise.

A single P4 is tested against dual G5s there — not really comparable.

 

[za9ra22]

Benchmarks say otherwise.

In the mid noughties I was using a Dual G5 alongside a Dual Xeon Dell Precision Workstation - they seemed pretty well matched for speed but the Windows experience was 'clunkier.'

It's not just benchmarks, but real-world users. In my environment, the G5s were always in far greater demand for a range of work - particularly in the 'design' space - than the top-flight PCs running Windows.

Much the same comments too, that the experience of Windows was 'less refined', 'more granular'... it seemed like it to me too.

 

[headlessmike]

LOL. They backed a series of wrong horses until they finally got with x86. When a new generation of 68K/PPC dropped they'd sometimes enjoy a brief window of being ahead, before x86 inevitably steamrolled past. The key thing to bear in mind is that whilst the top Macs were sometimes faster than PCs, they were bloody expensive. As 'bad' as the Pentium 4 was, a cheap 3GHz P4 was likely faster at most things than a G5.

Having started my Mac journey with a 400MHz G4, I switched to a P4 / XP in the early years of dog-slow OSX, and only returned to the Mac with Tiger / Intel. A big part of the appeal was that with the hardware 'rivalry' finally over, Macs would now have lasting parity with the PC market. With the latest transition, Apple can at least leverage their impressive smartphone technology (which comes with certain related drawbacks); it will be interesting to see if they can maintain their PPW lead on x86 long term though.

I say this as someone with a bunch of PPC Macs (a Cube, TiBook, QS G4, Pismo etc.) that I love as collector's pieces.

In hindsight, yes, but from the transition to PPC in the 90s and up until the early 2000s things were still looking pretty good. Things got complicated by the time the G5 rolled around and there was no viable path forward for the lower power machines like laptops.

 

[Dronecatcher]

A single P4 is tested against dual G5s there — not really comparable.

Some of the tests are not multi-processor aware and a lower clocked G5 still leads the 3Ghz P4.

 

[mode11]

Benchmarks say otherwise.

In the mid noughties I was using a Dual G5 alongside a Dual Xeon Dell Precision Workstation - they seemed pretty well matched for speed but the Windows experience was 'clunkier.'

Fair enough - the G5s were quicker than I thought. I bowed out before that point, so was probably thinking more of the G4 systems. It seems that PCs of comparable price to the G5 were competitive (https://barefeats.com/macvpc.html), though smoked the G5 for 3D graphics (https://barefeats.com/mac2pc.html). As someone who switched to PC specifically for 3ds Max, this would have been decisive; the advantage held for 3D apps like Maya as well as games.

Not that I had the money for any of those workstations - I would have been looking at an iMac G5, which would have been much less competitive with desktop PCs (especially for graphics). Plus, it's all a bit moot as 3ds is Windows-only anyway.

But sure, I accept a single core P4 was nowhere near a dual G5.

 

[akator]

LOL. They backed a series of wrong horses until they finally got with x86.

I disagree.

Firstly, the CPU architecture is far less important than the software experience. For the first decade plus, Mac systems were significantly superior to the alternatives. Pricey, yes, but there really was no comparison. Many have argued that it wasn't until Windows 7 that there was a truly comparable user experience with ease of use and pleasure of use. (An option that I agree with.)

But since this topic is about hardware:

1. Macs started with 68K Motorola. This architecture was very competent. The Quadra / 68040 variants were notably faster than their Intel counterparts.
2. The PowerPC architecture was beast at the time it was released and for most of the the over 10 years that it was used. The majority of that time it outperformed Intel machines. Combined with the more pleasing and substantially easier to use Mac OS, PowerPC was a good thing.
3. It was AMD and *not* Intel that first released machines that beat PowerPC. That was short lived.
4. What killed the PowerPC wasn't that it was "the wrong horse" but that the FreeScale / IBM alliance had worn out. IBM was no longer interested in devoting engineering to PowerPC chips for desktops and laptops because at that point Apple was the only major buyer and there wasn't enough demand from Apple to warrant IBM's continued engineering and manufacturing investment. The architecture was entirely capable of continuing, but the lack of improved laptop capable PowerPC chips was a killer. This was all the result of business choices, not any inherent problems with the PowerPC architecture itself.
5. Apple could have switched to Intel *or* AMD. They chose Intel because of private deals offered by Intel that undercut AMD pricing.
6. The drop in Apple prices because of the switch to cheaper commodity Intel hardware, something Apple heavily promoted and used as additional justification for the switch, was short lived. It was only a few years before Apple prices were back to the previous premiums, further compounded when Apple made the choices to eliminate use upgradeable RAM and storage, a tactic they had used many years before to ensure higher profits.

I would say that looking at the history of Apple CPUs 1984-2005, they didn't back a series or wrong horses.

 

[za9ra22]

@akator - just about perfect!

 

[mode11]

I disagree.

Firstly, the CPU architecture is far less important than the software experience. For the first decade plus, Mac systems were significantly superior to the alternatives. Pricey, yes, but there really was no comparison. Many have argued that it wasn't until Windows 7 that there was a truly comparable user experience with ease of use and pleasure of use. (An option that I agree with.)

Sure, the OS has always been the Mac’s trump card.

But since this topic is about hardware:

1. Macs started with 68K Motorola. This architecture was very competent. The Quadra / 68040 variants were notably faster than their Intel counterparts.

At the same clock speed. Unfortunately, the 040 got stuck at 40MHz whilst the equivalent 486 went on to 100MHz+.

1. The PowerPC architecture was beast at the time it was released and for most of the the over 10 years that it was used. The majority of that time it outperformed Intel machines.

Again, at the same MHz. But the same money would get you a higher clocked PC, and performance would mostly be a wash (e.g. in 1999, you’d be looking at a 350MHz G3 vs a 500MHz P3 - https://www.sfgate.com/business/article/pentium-iii-pcs-g3-macs-aren-t-radical-2944056.php}.

There was nothing wrong with the PPC architecture - quite the opposite. The issue was with development budget and manufacturing technology. This stemmed directly from the fact that the Mac had about 5% of the market, and x86 had most of the remainder.

Combined with the more pleasing and substantially easier to use Mac OS, PowerPC was a good thing.

Yes, we’ve already agreed Mac OS was nicer than Windows.

1. It was AMD and *not* Intel that first released machines that beat PowerPC. That was short lived.

The point is that x86 had the entire PC industry behind it, including the intense rivalry between Intel and AMD. AIM / PPC put up a valiant fight, but was never going to win (at least for longer than 5 minutes, after the release of a new PPC generation).

1. What killed the PowerPC wasn't that it was "the wrong horse" but that the FreeScale / IBM alliance had worn out. IBM was no longer interested in devoting engineering to PowerPC chips for desktops and laptops because at that point Apple was the only major buyer and there wasn't enough demand from Apple to warrant IBM's continued engineering and manufacturing investment. The architecture was entirely capable of continuing, but the lack of improved laptop capable PowerPC chips was a killer. This was all the result of business choices, not any inherent problems with the PowerPC architecture itself.

Sure, but this is why it was the wrong horse, for the reasons I mentioned above. David doesn’t continually beat Goliath.

1. Apple could have switched to Intel *or* AMD. They chose Intel because of private deals offered by Intel that undercut AMD pricing.

Not sure what the relevance of this is. My argument was about the x86 architecture, not Intel specifically.

1. The drop in Apple prices because of the switch to cheaper commodity Intel hardware, something Apple heavily promoted and used as additional justification for the switch, was short lived. It was only a few years before Apple prices were back to the previous premiums, further compounded when Apple made the choices to eliminate use upgradeable RAM and storage, a tactic they had used many years before to ensure higher profits.

Yes. If there is one constant with Apple through all their architectures, it’s that they’ll price their machines as high as they can get away with. The spoils of being the sole hardware provider for their platform; they can get away with it in a way that Dell or HP can’t.

I would say that looking at the history of Apple CPUs 1984-2005, they didn't back a series or wrong horses.

Their unique hardware gave Macs a certain mystique. it’s hard to say if Macs would have been more or less popular if they had used x86 in the 80’s / 90’s. They certainly became more popular after the x86 transition in the 2000’s, though there were other factors. For what it’s worth, when 68K foundered, Jobs ported NextSTEP directly to x86 and didn’t bother with PPC.

 

[dpny]

I disagree.

Firstly, the CPU architecture is far less important than the software experience. For the first decade plus, Mac systems were significantly superior to the alternatives. Pricey, yes, but there really was no comparison. Many have argued that it wasn't until Windows 7 that there was a truly comparable user experience with ease of use and pleasure of use. (An option that I agree with.)

But since this topic is about hardware:

1. Macs started with 68K Motorola. This architecture was very competent. The Quadra / 68040 variants were notably faster than their Intel counterparts.
2. The PowerPC architecture was beast at the time it was released and for most of the the over 10 years that it was used. The majority of that time it outperformed Intel machines. Combined with the more pleasing and substantially easier to use Mac OS, PowerPC was a good thing.
3. It was AMD and *not* Intel that first released machines that beat PowerPC. That was short lived.
4. What killed the PowerPC wasn't that it was "the wrong horse" but that the FreeScale / IBM alliance had worn out. IBM was no longer interested in devoting engineering to PowerPC chips for desktops and laptops because at that point Apple was the only major buyer and there wasn't enough demand from Apple to warrant IBM's continued engineering and manufacturing investment. The architecture was entirely capable of continuing, but the lack of improved laptop capable PowerPC chips was a killer. This was all the result of business choices, not any inherent problems with the PowerPC architecture itself.
5. Apple could have switched to Intel *or* AMD. They chose Intel because of private deals offered by Intel that undercut AMD pricing.
6. The drop in Apple prices because of the switch to cheaper commodity Intel hardware, something Apple heavily promoted and used as additional justification for the switch, was short lived. It was only a few years before Apple prices were back to the previous premiums, further compounded when Apple made the choices to eliminate use upgradeable RAM and storage, a tactic they had used many years before to ensure higher profits.

I would say that looking at the history of Apple CPUs 1984-2005, they didn't back a series or wrong horses.

I know I'm picking nits, but I'll disagree with a few points.

AMD's (and Intel) CPUs beating PPC wasn't short-lived. It was AMD's release of the Athlon, and the MHz Wars which followed, which caught Motorola completely flatfooted and unable to produce SOI chips much faster than 500MHz in any decent quantity. PPC chips only caught up when IBM jury rigged a POWER4 server chip into the G5, and even then it came with considerable tradeoffs for power use and heat dissipation. For about the same price as a G5 you could get an Athlon-powered machine with about the same performance and which didn't sound like someone was running a vacuum cleaner next to you. And then IBM reneged on their promise to push the G5 past 3 GHz and, once again, PPC was behind the performance curve again. It wasn't until the first Xeon-powered Mac Pros came out that you could actually argue the performance/dollar comparison with a straight face.

And it was Windows 95 which first saw Windows leap ahead of the classic Mac OS. At the time when OS 9 was essentially a series of patches and kludges sewn together into an OS, W95 had pre-emptive multiasking and multuser support that Mac users wouldn't get until OS X.

 

[mode11]

It wasn't until the first Xeon-powered Mac Pros came out that you could actually argue the performance/dollar comparison with a straight face.

In the early 2000’s, OS 9 was creaking with age; XP felt so much more advanced. OS X looked promising, but was still slow and feature-deficient. And whilst Intel and AMD were leapfrogging each other to multiple GHz, Apple were struggling to exceed 1GHz (and on a slow, non-DDR bus).

Apple abandoning their proprietary, perpetually-falling-behind architectures and using standard PC hardware finally made then viable in the eyes of many people.