Reports from back in the day said that Apple strongly considered adopting this chip for their laptops before ultimately switching to Intel.

>The Register is reporting that PA Semi had a close relationship with Apple in the months prior to the switch, and that the two companies were working together to gauge the feasibility of running native PowerPC-coded software on 2GHz dual-core chips that PA Semi claims run at only a third of the 21 to 25 watts consumed by Intel's Core Duo models. Sources who spoke to El Reg say that executives were virtually positive that they'd win the contract, and that CEO Dan Dobberpuhl was understandably "furious" when he found out PA Semi had been passed over.

https://www.engadget.com/2006-05-22-apple-considered-small-c...

The Reg story: https://www.theregister.com/2006/05/19/pasemi_apple/

(The Reg is my day job but this is long before my time there.)

Had Apple adopted a chip from PA Semi, PA Semi could not have been acquihired for the same price for certain, which could have significantly been worse for the Apple ARM chips. In hindsight it's hard to see that it could have worked out better for Apple in the long term, but being passed over by Apple was bad news for PASemi.

The PA6T was absurdly better perf/watt than what Freescale was offering at the time, and IBM had already signaled it was was no longer interested in making any Power chip that wasn't designed specifically for its own mainframes.

Kinda sorta.

IBM made POWER for its own RISC workstations and servers: originally the RT/PC, later RS/6000, now IBM p Series.

Not mainframes, which have a different CPU architecture altogether.

Part of Apple's insight was that laptops were at that time (i.e. 2006-2008) becoming more important than desktops. It had G5 desktops but only G4 laptops.

IBM said it wasn't going to be doing any laptop chips, and that was a factor pushing Apple away from PowerPC. PA Semi could have been an alternative path, though.

The PowerBooks were so far behind in performance at that point that Apple would have had to figure out something else if they hadn’t gone to Intel.

If not Intel switch, Macs would not have had the popularity surge — that was driven by the idea that, worst case, you could still run Windows full time if you had to. It might not have mattered as much once the iPhone was out, but it probably would have increased the pressure for non-Xcode dev tools for the iPhone.

I don't think that's entirely true or fair.

G4 Powerbooks were very usable and are still highly collectable today. I have two G4s myself.

Yes, Intel kit was somewhat quicker, in some tests, some of the time, but bear in mind the comparison at the time: Intel's state of the art then was the Pentium 4.

The P4 had a nickname of being a fanheater, because it ran so hot and had such a low IPC that its performance even at high clock speeds was poor.

AMD was just bringing in Sledghammer, the Opteron/Athlon64 range, but they were not laptop chips either. So that meant that they were up against the G5 as a desktop chip, which was respectable.

The things you are missing are:

* Apple saw that laptops were more important than desktops. POWER was strong and still is, but as a server chip, not in portables.

* Apple was sold on the promise of future Intel chips, mainly the Core 2 series, and nothing Intel had at that time...

* ... or that AMD had at that time.

* There is another big advantage that is forgotten now that Apple saw then.

PowerPC was Apple's old platform. The pre-OS X OS, Classic, ran on PowerPC. OS X could run Classic in a VM on PowerPC. This was good for long-time Apple users.

But if it switched to Intel, notably the future 64-bit Intel chips that didn't even exist yet, then it would lose the ability to run Classic in a VM... but it would gain the ability to run x86 OSes natively in VMs. In other words it could run Windows in a VM at near-full-speed, giving the ability to run Windows apps, which looking to the future was far more important than the ability to run old PowerPC Classic MacOS apps.

It was 100% not an issue of "Apple compared Intel to PowerPC and Intel was quicker." At the time of the comparison, Intel was slower and hotter.

> Apple was sold on the promise of future Intel chips, mainly the Core 2 series, and nothing Intel had at that time...

Yup. It's worth remembering that at the time of the switch, Apple downgraded from 64 bit Power PC chips to Intel's initial version of Core which was only 32 bit.

They didn't get back to a 64 bit implementation until Core 2 launched.

>The P4 had a nickname of being a fanheater, because it ran so hot and had such a low IPC that its performance even at high clock speeds was poor.

The Pentium IV ran so hot that the infamous demo back in the day was of people cooking pasta on it.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sG3wceb05Sg

> It's worth remembering that at the time of the switch, Apple downgraded from 64 bit Power PC chips to Intel's initial version of Core which was only 32 bit.

Oh my word! That's an excellent point which I did not notice even at the time.

Good catch, and a great video reference, too!