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Comment by geenew | Hacker News Reader

To be fair, PowerPC was dramatically faster at the time. Akin to the jump with M1.

Although it was supposed to be, PowerPC wasn’t the leap forward that the M1 was, partially because the system software was still largely run in 68k emulation and partially because Intel poured infinite money into making x86 faster to remain competitive with RISC processors.

> Although it was supposed to be, PowerPC wasn’t the leap forward that the M1 was

Just as with M1, it depends on your workload.

For instance, in the old school PBS show, The Computer Chronicles, they mention a prepress shop using the first PowerPC Macs that saw one of their workflows go from hours to minutes.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ic0dkf1iFOY

Speaking from my own impressions, the UI was noticeably faster. There were many applications - mp3 playing, for example - that only worked on PowerPC.

Over time Intel became faster, but there was a period of ~1-3? years when PPC was faster. AFAIR :)

SMP was sort-of included mid System 7. I doubt many programs took advantage of it because the programming model isn't like async GCD-based with origins in NeXTSTEP (NS...) like it is now in macOS X+. I'm guessing there wasn't much to take advantage of multiple processors except specialized professional apps like Photoshop, Illustrator, PageMaker, QuarkXPress, LightWave, Maya, and not much else. That's the only reason they could justify their prices, effectively competing in a similar space as NeXTSTEP was.

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