4 ms·

PC’s were stuck with awful hardware for a long time, but the Mac story is a bit more complicated — once they became available, higher-end 68020/68030 Macs were

PC’s were stuck with awful hardware for a long time, but the Mac story is a bit more complicated — once they became available, higher-end 68020/68030 Macs were sometimes competitive with workstations.

ajross 4y ago
No. Mac II's showed up in the late 80's just as the workstation vendors were moving off 68k hardware and onto SPARC and MIPS. PA and POWER came along a few years after that, then Alpha a bit later still. Motorola never got back in the game, really, though Intel caught up with the release of the P6 in 1995.
- hulitu 4y ago
  > Motorola never got back in the game I though POWER was born as a child of IBM and Motorola.
  - mepian 4y ago
    PowerPC, not POWER: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AIM_alliance https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AIM_alliance
fortran77 4y ago
Absolutely not! The MacOS was terrible; no functioning virtual memory, no memory protection between processes.
- lproven 4y ago
  This is only considering part of the question, which makes it a false comparison. Classic MacOS had pretty much the best UI on any mass-market computer ever made. And that's the part that its users saw all day every day, and interacted with, and which made Macs desirable. Not just the front-end of programs: this extended to how to install new programs, how to add drivers or other system components, how to add fonts; how to connect to printers; how to make or break drive connections to other machines; how to connect new drives, and how to remove them. All the daily tasks of running a computer. But UNIX people, with their gods-awful UI, didn't care about this then and they don't care about it now. UNIX UIs are better than they were but they are still very poor. The real problem is that all the visionary innovators got old and retired and their replacements don't have the overall vision and don't really understand how stuff works, so they randomly tweak things without understanding. So Mac OS X's UI was never as good as Classic's, and it's been getting worse and worse for 10-15Y. Read John Siracusa's excellent in-depth reviews of Mac OS X on Ars Technica for details. The generally accepted high point was Snow Leopard, 10.6, and it's been downhill since. Microsoft never had much of the plot, but what they had hit a high point around 1996-1996 and it's been downhill since. Now, as in the last decade, Windows is a UI train wreck. But still people bang on about largely irrelevant behind-the-scenes stuff, not understanding that it's the whole picture that matters, not just the UI but not just the backend either.
mistrial9 4y ago
absolutely yes! depends on your model and use case .. workstation fans often have this reaction though. Please recall that performance is not one number. Someone/something has to write code in a language, invoke hardware well and efficiently, and return the results to a user or process. Drop-down menus meant that no way could the machine do math? hardly true.. Performance on benchmarks ? probably as the others say, you will never win like a horse race. Overall in the expanding world of digital signals, media and math ? yes.. the Motorola chips had access to RAM if you could get enough of it. RAM plus math gets you a lot of places. Virtual Memory is guaranteed RAM but at what cost? all things considered, yes the Motorola CPUs did bring something and it was a highly competitive time. edit right, add to that "digital audio signal processing" .. Virtual Memory paging was horribly obvious for Digital Audio, and that means stereo audio albums and digital audio soundtracks for movies, which was (and is) Big Business. Lots of hard math problems for geeks, lots of sales for business types.

ajross 4y ago

No. Mac II's showed up in the late 80's just as the workstation vendors were moving off 68k hardware and onto SPARC and MIPS. PA and POWER came along a few years after that, then Alpha a bit later still. Motorola never got back in the game, really, though Intel caught up with the release of the P6 in 1995.

hulitu 4y ago
> Motorola never got back in the game I though POWER was born as a child of IBM and Motorola.
- mepian 4y ago
  PowerPC, not POWER: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AIM_alliance https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AIM_alliance

fortran77 4y ago

Absolutely not! The MacOS was terrible; no functioning virtual memory, no memory protection between processes.

lproven 4y ago
This is only considering part of the question, which makes it a false comparison. Classic MacOS had pretty much the best UI on any mass-market computer ever made. And that's the part that its users saw all day every day, and interacted with, and which made Macs desirable. Not just the front-end of programs: this extended to how to install new programs, how to add drivers or other system components, how to add fonts; how to connect to printers; how to make or break drive connections to other machines; how to connect new drives, and how to remove them. All the daily tasks of running a computer. But UNIX people, with their gods-awful UI, didn't care about this then and they don't care about it now. UNIX UIs are better than they were but they are still very poor. The real problem is that all the visionary innovators got old and retired and their replacements don't have the overall vision and don't really understand how stuff works, so they randomly tweak things without understanding. So Mac OS X's UI was never as good as Classic's, and it's been getting worse and worse for 10-15Y. Read John Siracusa's excellent in-depth reviews of Mac OS X on Ars Technica for details. The generally accepted high point was Snow Leopard, 10.6, and it's been downhill since. Microsoft never had much of the plot, but what they had hit a high point around 1996-1996 and it's been downhill since. Now, as in the last decade, Windows is a UI train wreck. But still people bang on about largely irrelevant behind-the-scenes stuff, not understanding that it's the whole picture that matters, not just the UI but not just the backend either.

mistrial9 4y ago

absolutely yes! depends on your model and use case .. workstation fans often have this reaction though. Please recall that performance is not one number. Someone/something has to write code in a language, invoke hardware well and efficiently, and return the results to a user or process. Drop-down menus meant that no way could the machine do math? hardly true.. Performance on benchmarks ? probably as the others say, you will never win like a horse race. Overall in the expanding world of digital signals, media and math ? yes.. the Motorola chips had access to RAM if you could get enough of it. RAM plus math gets you a lot of places. Virtual Memory is guaranteed RAM but at what cost? all things considered, yes the Motorola CPUs did bring something and it was a highly competitive time. edit right, add to that "digital audio signal processing" .. Virtual Memory paging was horribly obvious for Digital Audio, and that means stereo audio albums and digital audio soundtracks for movies, which was (and is) Big Business. Lots of hard math problems for geeks, lots of sales for business types.