10 years of Intel Macs
The decade since Apple changed its processors.
In 2006, Apple made a huge change to its Macs, one few people would have anticipated just a few years before – it switched from using Motorola’s PowerPC processors to Intel chips. Apple and the PowerPC chips were a long-term pairing, and seemed inseparable. Sadly (for nostalgics, at least), expectations of what a processor would do were moving on, and Motorola’s silicon was struggling to keep up.
When it came to single-core processors, the PowerPC units were brutes, and Apple made blisteringly fast machines with the G4 and G5 at the helm. But the PowerPC architecture was starting to look like a dead end. The G5 chip was hugely powerful, but it was also large and power-hungry, and getting it into an inch-thick notebook (because a notebook being an inch thick was still impressive back then) just looked totally unfeasible; Apple’s PowerBook line finished its life still using the G4.
Apple had been hiding a secret version of OS X that could run on Intel’s processors for years – it was originally created by an engineer who wanted a project he could work on while at home, so he could move away from Apple’s HQ when his first child was due. In late 2001, he showed it to Apple for the first time, and it instantly became a serious “skunkworks” project, worked on in secret offices away from other engineers.
The transition to Intel wasn’t totally smooth: the first Intel Core Duo processors ran hot, and developers’ apps needed to be rewritten to work on Intel machines, so there was no guarantee all your apps would work if you upgraded. Intel’s secondgeneration Core 2 Duo chips fixed the first problem, while time and enthusiasm for the power of the new machines led developers to fix the second (some faster than others).
PowerPC chips still went on, too – they powered the Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3, released in late 2005 and late 2006 respectively.
On top of that, multi-core processors were clearly the future, based on Intel and AMD’s performance successes with their chips – especially in creative areas such as video editing, where Apple prided itself as being a strong pro choice. The only option was for Apple to switch processor types, and in 2005, it announced that it would be moving to Intel, with the first MacBooks launched in 2006.