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But they had to do _something_, staying on the 68k wasn’t an option. It couldn’t compete with the Pentium and Motorola had effectively abandoned the series, foc

But they had to do _something_, staying on the 68k wasn’t an option. It couldn’t compete with the Pentium and Motorola had effectively abandoned the series, focusing their efforts on the PowerPC. Apple made a lot of bad decisions in the 90s, but I don’t see how the switch to PPC was one of them.

cmrdporcupine 4y ago
I don't think it was a bad decision, it was inevitable they had to switch as Motorola left 68k customers in the lurch. The actual bad decision was not investing in better OS development in the 80s. Put it this way: the Lisa had an MMU, memory protection, and an OS with better multitasking. Yes it was expensive to make, but they could have scaled it down instead of building a whole other, competing system that was technically inferior from an operating system perspective. The original Mac was built as if it was a one-off product, and they lived with the results of that for two decades. And these were Jobs' choices.
- lproven 4y ago
  > the Lisa had an MMU, memory protection, and an OS with better multitasking. Yes it was expensive to make, but they could have scaled it down Yes and no. I mean, the Mac is a cut-down Lisa. But you're right, cut down too far. (Aside: the Lisa was a 68000 as well, I am fairly sure. No MMU, but it did have multitasking.) I think the problems were in scaling it down far enough to get the price down to vaguely reasonable. That meant: • 128kB RAM (same as the Sinclair QL, which launched 2 weeks earlier) • No hard disk. Keeping a full multitasking OS when running from 400kB single-sided double-density floppies -- indeed, from one floppy -- would have been significantly hard. Before an outraged Amiga fan jumps in: yes, I know Amiga did it, but that was 2 years later, with 4x as much RAM and floppies holding 2x as much data. Tech was moving fast in the 1980s. A 512kB original Mac with 800kB floppies was technologically doable in 1984, I suspect, but instead of costing $2500 when it launched (~1/4 of a Lisa), it would have been $5000 or something, and I strongly suspect it would have flopped too, as a result.
  - cmrdporcupine 4y ago
    The Lisa had a custom MMU, if I recall. There were other 68000 based systems that were similar. My key point is around the operating system. They had a system in LisaOS that had multitasking, memory protection, proper dynamic allocation, etc. It was a better OS than what was shipped on the Mac. It was unfortunate they threw it away. Likely due to personal & organizational politics more than technical and cost reasons (Jobs hated the Lisa). A few years later they were running Mac OS on old Lisa hardware.

cmrdporcupine 4y ago

I don't think it was a bad decision, it was inevitable they had to switch as Motorola left 68k customers in the lurch. The actual bad decision was not investing in better OS development in the 80s. Put it this way: the Lisa had an MMU, memory protection, and an OS with better multitasking. Yes it was expensive to make, but they could have scaled it down instead of building a whole other, competing system that was technically inferior from an operating system perspective. The original Mac was built as if it was a one-off product, and they lived with the results of that for two decades. And these were Jobs' choices.

lproven 4y ago
> the Lisa had an MMU, memory protection, and an OS with better multitasking. Yes it was expensive to make, but they could have scaled it down Yes and no. I mean, the Mac is a cut-down Lisa. But you're right, cut down too far. (Aside: the Lisa was a 68000 as well, I am fairly sure. No MMU, but it did have multitasking.) I think the problems were in scaling it down far enough to get the price down to vaguely reasonable. That meant: • 128kB RAM (same as the Sinclair QL, which launched 2 weeks earlier) • No hard disk. Keeping a full multitasking OS when running from 400kB single-sided double-density floppies -- indeed, from one floppy -- would have been significantly hard. Before an outraged Amiga fan jumps in: yes, I know Amiga did it, but that was 2 years later, with 4x as much RAM and floppies holding 2x as much data. Tech was moving fast in the 1980s. A 512kB original Mac with 800kB floppies was technologically doable in 1984, I suspect, but instead of costing $2500 when it launched (~1/4 of a Lisa), it would have been $5000 or something, and I strongly suspect it would have flopped too, as a result.
- cmrdporcupine 4y ago
  The Lisa had a custom MMU, if I recall. There were other 68000 based systems that were similar. My key point is around the operating system. They had a system in LisaOS that had multitasking, memory protection, proper dynamic allocation, etc. It was a better OS than what was shipped on the Mac. It was unfortunate they threw it away. Likely due to personal & organizational politics more than technical and cost reasons (Jobs hated the Lisa). A few years later they were running Mac OS on old Lisa hardware.