Apple produced these desktops, towers and cubes from 1994 to 2006. The 15.4' model also (re)gained a firewire800 port and a dual-layer SuperDrive.Questions tagged power-mac Power Mac is the shortened name for previously called 'Power Macintosh' computers. Leopard was released on Octoas the successor of Mac OS X 10.4 Tiger, and is available in two editions: a desktop version suitable for personal computers, and a server version, Mac OS X Server.It retailed for 129 for the desktop version (c) 2010 by Darek Mihocka, founder, Emulators.com.Introduced in October 2006, the MacBook Pro (Late 2006) was essentially a speed-bump of the MacBook Pro and MacBook Pro (17-inch) models to include faster Intel Core 2 Duo processors. Mac OS X Leopard (version 10.5) is the sixth major release of macOS, Apples desktop and server operating system for Macintosh computers.
For Power G5 2005 Version 10.5.8 Software Optimized ForThe Fedora project officially dropped PowerPC support from the recently released Fedora 13 Linux release. The PowerPC processor, the microprocessor of the Sony Playstation 3, the Xbox 360, the Wii, and many generations of Apple Macintosh computers, has been demoted to second class citizen status. Mac G5 units with application software optimized for the PowerPC G5.This is the most shocking and disappointing news of the year so far for me.With Microsoft never releasing the "rumored" Helium ( ), Sony was the only company to give people a legal and easy way to run Windows and just about any other software on a $300 game console.I am immensely pissed off about these two sad developments. The PS/3 offered a way to test out code sequences and try code optimization techniques on something just about as different as any mainstream PC can get - big endian integers instead of little endian, 64-bit registers, in-order pipeline - long before the recent revival of the Pentium processor (in the form of the Intel Atom) or the ARM processor which powers today's cell phones and iPads. I myself have been running Fedora on my PS/3 since the Fedora 8 days.The 1990's were anything but a sure thing for Intel and x86, and I for one was convinced that PowerPC was the logical 64-bit successor to 32-bit Pentium based PCs.The design of the PowerPC chip is so clean, so well thought out, that even back in 1993 the PowerPC instruction set already thought out hardware virtualization correctly (which AMD and Intel processors still can't agree on today with their competing versions of VT), already thought ahead to 64-bit wide registers and 64-bit addressing and how 32-bit and 64-bit code could even be mixed together in the same process. Long before Xbox 360 and PS/3, not only was Apple using PowerPC to run Mac OS on, but Microsoft Windows itself ran on PowerPC-based IBM PCs. Yes, there really was such a retail product, two of them actually, one targeting 68040 Macintosh development and the other targeting PowerPC.The local Mac user group here in Seattle, dBug, recently had a liquidation sale to dump its "old" Mac hardware. VHS battle two decades ago, and so it is a damn shame that they are active and willing participants in dropping the PowerPC Linux support from the PS/3.The other shame about the demotion of PowerPC is that the PowerPC G4 and G5 were damn good processors at the time. Sony learned this the hard way in the Betamax vs. No wonder that much of my 15-year career at Microsoft spanning the past two decades involved working on the Macintosh cross compilers, Mac Office, and the Xbox tools.The slow death of the PowerPC points out once again what I started saying right back in part 1 of this blog, technically superiority doesn't mean success in the marketplace. That was true of the Mac Pro G5 as it is true of today's Mac Pro. The whole machine can be taken apart and upgraded - memory DIMMs upgraded, hard disks upgraded, processor added - without so much as a screwdriver everything just snaps out. The Mac Pro G5 desktop, the predecessor to today's Intel-based Mac Pro machines, is a beautiful and quiet marvel of engineering. I bought up the whole lot, as well as some dual-core and quad-core PowerMac G5 machines for about a couple hundreds bucks each.Now talk about a sweet machine. And specifically, that the way that we (Xbox developers at Microsoft) bootstrapped the Xbox 360 development back then was to start with. In fact, back in the 2003 timeframe when Apple started shipping the G5 (when Intel did not even make or admit to making a 64-bit x86 processor) is it any wonder that Microsoft chose the PowerPC processor for the Xbox 360. Both of my G5 machines contain at least 6 gigabytes of memory each, which makes them great for hosting emulators and experimenting with virtual machines. So why get rid of them?Being 64-bit, most models of the Mac Pro G5 had no 4-gigabyte limitation ( ) as with many of today's PCs. Space engine for macVHS war, where the lower price of VHS products ultimately prevailed, the higher cost of PowerPC based Macintosh computers likely kept them from becoming mainstream. Most people out there are still running 32-bit operating systems and 32-bit applications, wasting their 64-bit hardware.This begs the question, with the huge superiority of PowerPC years ahead of mainstream Intel products, what might have been if PowerPC had won?Oops! Was I fighting for the wrong side?!?!As with the Betamax vs. Only by about 2009 did the mainstream PC industry start pre-installing 64-bit versions of Windows and 64-bit Mac OS X 10.6 on most new computers sold. By 2006, when Intel _finally_ shipped the 64-bit Core and Apple switched over their whole PowerPC-based computer line to Intel's Core and Core processors, to game industry had already "been there done that" as far as 64-bit computing. It meant not only designing hardware that used PowerPC but also developing software development kits for game developers and training game developers to write PowerPC code. Apple had always charged more (and made more profit) from what is about the same cost of hardware, a fact of life that has remained true to this day although the "Apple tax" is much lower now in 2010 than it was in, say, 1999. that Windows based PCs, selling for about $2000 to $3000 in the late 1990's, were less expensive and more readily available to consumers than comparable Apple Macintosh computers which could easily cost $5000. That was based on three logical arguments which led me to develop the SoftMac product in the first place in the late 1990's: My whole sales pitch was to convince people not to buy a PowerMac, but instead to buy a PC. A decade ago I was running exhibits at Macworld and COMDEX shows selling the SoftMac product I developed to emulate Mac OS on Intel-based Windows PCs. ![]() I picked up my machines from dBug for a couple hundred bucks each, and when I looked online on Amazon, I found no shortage of top notch Mac Pro G5 machines for sale. Well, funny thing, the older PowerPC based Macintosh computers are a steal these days. With my new stash of PowerPC G4 Macs acquired from dBug, my existing PowerMac G4, my PowerMac G5 from Xbox development days, and a new Mac G5 I just picked up, I put my three logical arguments to the test.The first argument, the "Apple tax". The transition was swift, by 2006 the PowerPC models were dead, and Microsoft dropped all support for Virtual PC for Mac.I decided to put my decade-old logic to the test last month to see if those three arguments still held.
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