Difference between revisions of "Apple MacBook Pro 15 2006"

Apple was interested in having much improved PowerPC processors but the alliance with IBM and Motorola did not show great prospects. The pc market was quite small and a more balanced situation against Intel/AMD pcs was never materialised. Having quite low sales and not being attractive enough for professional user needs, especially in the video production environment, meant that Apple was desperate to release much better performing computers. Major efforts were done to release dual PowerPC G5 workstations, but any implementation attempted on laptops was even worse in terms of dissipation and energy consumption and Apple had to accept poorer performing laptops when the laptop market had the most promising sale increase.

As the OSX platform was agnostic to any CPU architecture, attempts to test Intel CPU performance were underway for many years. Recent stagnation in the PowerPC platform pushed Apple to attempt negotiations with Intel but Intel did not seem interested so Apple invested further in the last attempt at releasing faster PowerPC products. However, as soon as an agreement came, Apple switched the entire lineup to Intel in less than 2 years. Despite all previous marketing showdowns, Apple knew very well the strenghts and weaknesses of the PowerPC. While PowerPC architecture shined on floating point performance, the Intel one did the same but for multiprocessing, memory access and energy efficiency. Switching to the new platform required emulation and some operating system tweaks but Apple focused mostly on ensuring good enough compatibility. The code emulation for PowerPC was not very fast but ensured a quicker, smoother transition for users.

In the end, the transition to Intel CPUs offered many performance benefits to users and ensured Apple many years of product upgrade cycles that pleased market expectations. However, just as the near monopoly of PowerPC, Intel din not made enough architectural improvements, forgot about the near-disaster of the Pentium 4 and Itanium CPUs, slowly losing the performance per watt competition that Apple was very keen on keeping. This will later lead to Apple's transition to in-house developed CPU and GPU designs.