Steve Jobs Announced 19 Years Ago Today That Apple Would Switch To Intel Processors For Various Macs, Ditching The PowerPC Range Forever

The Apple Silicon transition was completed last year during the Mac Pro and Mac Studio announcement featuring the company’s most powerful custom chipset at the time, the M2 Ultra. However, before the introduction of the first Apple Silicon in 2020, the technology giant relied on Intel processors for years, and it all started with an announcement that Steve Jobs made 19 years ago today on June 6, when it was decided that various Macs would transition from PowerPC processors to Intel.

Before the switch to Intel, Apple’s Macs had been using PowerPC chips for 11 years

Jobs, Apple’s CEO then, made the announcement during the WWDC 2005 keynote, stating that the Cupertino firm would eventually stop using PowerPC processors, which Motorola and IBM supplied. The founder of Apple stated that the decision to move to Intel CPUs was thanks to their ‘performance per watt’ advantage over PowerPC, but looking at hindsight, Intel truly lost its way if Apple was forced to use custom chips in its Macs several years down the road.

Then again, as a company, Apple has always wanted more control over its hardware, so even if Intel were developing processors that impressed in both performance and efficiency, it would not have changed Apple’s decision over custom chip development. Another reason the transition to Intel processors was made was that IBM could not deliver more power-efficient processors to Apple. During the WWDC 2023 keynote, Jobs unveiled a Power Mac that touted an IBM PowerPC G5 processor but was not available to purchase.

This made the Power Mac the first personal computer to feature a 64-bit capable CPU. Jobs had promised customers and the Worldwide Developers Conference audience that a Power Mac G5 operating at 3.00GHz would arrive within 12 months. Unfortunately, Jobs could never fulfill that promise as IBM had immense difficulty moving to a fabrication process lower than 90nm.

Naturally, tensions started building between Apple and IBM, with the latter showing concerns over the profitability of its processors used in various Macs, which was already a low-volume business. Eventually, Jobs saw that Intel offered a superior product roadmap to IBM, but some people were not exactly thrilled over the news. For instance, Ovum, which is now a part of Omdia, said that the move was risky and foolish, as at the time, Intel’s innovation in processor design was nothing compared to the likes of AMD and IBM.

Fortunately, Apple’s and Jobs’ bets paid off, and on January 10, the first Intel-based Mac was announced. Shortly after, on February 28, the company’s first Mac mini sporting an Intel Core Duo processor was unveiled. Eventually, a chain of Macs with a multitude of Intel CPU options kept arriving with every passing year until that cycle was eventually broken by the M1, which launched in November 2020. If Steve Jobs had been alive and had witnessed the first Apple Silicon announcement, he likely would have been proud of his company’s achievement.