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x86 would have put Amiga in the same boat as Microsoft: driver hell for eternity. Also why x86 macOS was a bad idea. What they needed to do was invest in the s

x86 would have put Amiga in the same boat as Microsoft: driver hell for eternity. Also why x86 macOS was a bad idea. What they needed to do was invest in the successor Amiga chipset to the original one. Yanking the funding for Amiga R&D in the late 1980’s is what doomed Amiga and Commodore.

einherjae 4y ago
x86 has very little to do with driver hell in itself.
asveikau 4y ago
x86 macOS had a long and successful run. Or perhaps you mean porting Classic Mac in the 90s would have been a bad idea?
- icedchai 4y ago
  The core of MacOS (NeXTStep) was already ported to x86 long before Apple was even involved. Remember NeXTStep ran on x86 in the early 90's, as they exited the hardware business. It was not compelling for server workloads. It was also very picky on drivers, as the other poster implies. Plus it was difficult to build open source software for (SunOS was the gold standard for commercial Unix at the time. Everything you downloaded ran on Sun!) I knew guys who ran early ISPs, tried it for servers, then realized they'd be better off with a Sun box and then eventually early Linux (Slackware). They were trying to run a news server off of it, IIRC.
  - asveikau 4y ago
    I know this history. However, the point remains that Apple ran consumer products on Intel chips for 14 years or so and this was successful. I'm trying to parse out the claim being made. Eg. Is it an argument that the timing would have been bad in the 1990s? Notable that Apple also killed the experiment around PowerPC clones around the time Jobs came back.
    - icedchai 4y ago
      Timing does seem bad, seeing they had transitioned to PowerPC only 4 or 5 years before NeXT was acquired. And Intel had not yet really taken a huge performance lead. PowerPC's were still pretty competitive. It wasn't until the mid-2000's that it was clear they were not going to get a G5 or whatever running in a laptop. Apple also wasn't rolling in cash like the are today. They were struggling. They wouldn't have had the resources in the late 90's to support consumer-level x86 and the various hardware/driver configurations. NeXT was fine with supporting a limited set of configurations since they weren't targeting the "consumer" anyway. They were targeting high end commercial "workstation" customers. NeXTStep 486 cost something like $800 if I remember. The developer tools were more $$$. The people running that stuff could afford to spec out their machines properly.

einherjae 4y ago

x86 has very little to do with driver hell in itself.

asveikau 4y ago

x86 macOS had a long and successful run. Or perhaps you mean porting Classic Mac in the 90s would have been a bad idea?

icedchai 4y ago
The core of MacOS (NeXTStep) was already ported to x86 long before Apple was even involved. Remember NeXTStep ran on x86 in the early 90's, as they exited the hardware business. It was not compelling for server workloads. It was also very picky on drivers, as the other poster implies. Plus it was difficult to build open source software for (SunOS was the gold standard for commercial Unix at the time. Everything you downloaded ran on Sun!) I knew guys who ran early ISPs, tried it for servers, then realized they'd be better off with a Sun box and then eventually early Linux (Slackware). They were trying to run a news server off of it, IIRC.
- asveikau 4y ago
  I know this history. However, the point remains that Apple ran consumer products on Intel chips for 14 years or so and this was successful. I'm trying to parse out the claim being made. Eg. Is it an argument that the timing would have been bad in the 1990s? Notable that Apple also killed the experiment around PowerPC clones around the time Jobs came back.
  - icedchai 4y ago
    Timing does seem bad, seeing they had transitioned to PowerPC only 4 or 5 years before NeXT was acquired. And Intel had not yet really taken a huge performance lead. PowerPC's were still pretty competitive. It wasn't until the mid-2000's that it was clear they were not going to get a G5 or whatever running in a laptop. Apple also wasn't rolling in cash like the are today. They were struggling. They wouldn't have had the resources in the late 90's to support consumer-level x86 and the various hardware/driver configurations. NeXT was fine with supporting a limited set of configurations since they weren't targeting the "consumer" anyway. They were targeting high end commercial "workstation" customers. NeXTStep 486 cost something like $800 if I remember. The developer tools were more $$$. The people running that stuff could afford to spec out their machines properly.