The Intel Mac transition of 2006: How vastly different it was from the M1 Mac launch with Apple silicon
In January 2006 (17 years ago), Apple released the first Intel Macs on the market. It was the start of a new era after more than a decade of PowerPC Macs. I bought my first Mac in 2006 during that transition and upgraded once. In 2020, I upgraded again – to the M1 Mac Mini. This is the story of the differences I personally encountered during the switch from PowerPC to Intel vs Intel to Apple silicon.
Doubts about the future of the Mac – is it a PC in disguise? (2006)
Some of the PowerPC Mac owners were likely doubtful about moving to Intel processors. Apple had been mocking the slow Intel Pentium processors in the past. Now, all of a sudden, they were welcoming Intel as their biggest most important partner. The biggest argument (and also counter-argument) was that a Mac is basically an expensive luxury PC except it runs a different OS: MacOS X. ”Therefore, why should people buy a PC?”, some argued.
If you unscrewed the screws below the battery of a Macbook (yes, it used to be a thing before Apple glued everything) you would find a PC motherboard, albeit carefully designed and engineered by Apple. The white plastic shell and the glowing Apple logo on the backside of the Macbook’s LCD screen was also a reminder of that this was indeed a Mac. Yet, a part of the market wasn’t convinced about the merits of Intel Macs.
Clearly, they were going to have a rough start in the market. That is, until PCs were introduced to Windows Vista. Continue reading to learn more about what happened.
The Intel Mac success came from the downfall of Windows Vista
As things often turned out with the leadership of Steve Jobs, the Macbooks and iMacs turned out to sell like hot cakes. While I personally bought my Intel Macbook in 2006, most people around me bought it in late 2007, during the time when Windows Vista started to be bundled with new PCs. Just mentioning the name ”Vista” will probably send chills down your spines. The OS faced heavy criticism and when things went too much downhill, this happened (source):
There were reports of Vista users ”downgrading” their operating systems back to XP, as well as reports of businesses planning to skip Vista
The thing is, in Vista, Microsoft radically redesigned Windows at its core for the first time in years, which affected compatibility with software to some extent. On top of this, people got tired pretty quickly of UAC (User Access Control) popping up way too frequently on average.
What the Windows Vista marketing failure meant for Apple
It was apparent to me at the time, that friends of mine and judging from forum posts online, people did one of two things when they realised a new PC would have Windows Vista on it: downgrade to Windows XP or – get a new Mac with MacOS Tiger or Leopard (depending on when in 2007 they bought the Mac, as Leopard was released in October that year).
Apple realised they had an opportunity to acquire new customers and so they mocked Windows Vista’s annoyances in their ads, the famous Mac vs PC campaign starring Justin Long (Mac) and John Hodgman (PC). These proved to become really popular in the tech space for quite some time. They had humour but were not extreme. In my view, they were also elegant and minimal. Apple made themselves look like the hero that saved PC users from frustrations.
Before the iPhone – before smartphones changed everything
In 2006, the Mac was Apple’s primary product. Their ”laser focus”, as Steve Jobs would probably have called it. There was no announcement of the iPhone yet. By late 2007, when MacOS X Leopard was released, North America and the UK were two of very few markets were the iPhone was sold. App Store wasn’t announced yet and the move to smartphones was only getting started, gradually. I mention this important information because later on, the iPhone would play a key role as a way to introduce everyone to Apple. It was the kitchen door in to people’s homes – including many millions of Windows PC owners.
But, before the iPhone 3G introduced the iPhone to a world-wide audience and also received the App Store in an OS update (2008), new Mac owners were always coming from another desktop OS: primarily Windows or Linux. We called them ”switchers”. Cellphones were used for calling, texting and listening to on-device MP3 music copied over from a computer using a data cable (do you remember those?).
Intel transition vs Apple silicon: no tight ”ecosystem”
Today we’re facing the reality of Apple’s tight integration of the Apple product ecosystem: your iPhone connects seamlessly to your Mac, Airpods easily connect to your iPhone, share app purchases between iPhone, iPad (and Mac + Apple TV to some extent). Easily stream your purchased music, subscribe to Apple Music and watch movies you bought on your iPhone, on the TV using the Apple TV device.
In the early Intel Mac era, the ecosystem was focused on iTunes Music.
People bought music on the Mac with the iTunes application, then iTunes-synced those songs to the iPod. Since iTunes was available for Windows, too, this wasn’t much of a customer lock-in by platform.
Instead, the lock was applied to the music files themselves: Digital Rights Management, or DRM for short. This is how your music would stay on your Apple devices. Once you built yourself a library of purchased iTunes music, it was easier to keep growing the library than starting over with unprotected MP3 or AAC/AAC+ music files.
Thankfully, DRM was no longer applied to new music purchases a few years later. Record companies also agreed on letting users unlock existing purchases for a low fee, applied to every DRM:ed song. However, if you had purchased a ton over the years from iTunes Store, this was not music to your ears since the small price per song would quickly add up. In my case, it wasn’t a big deal. I was lucky to have only bought a reasonable amount of music up to that point.
Apple silicon in 2020: iPhone customers with PCs are buying Macs
When the M1 launched as the first Apple-designed Mac processor, customers already had Apple devices in droves. They weren’t foreign to Apple concepts. They stored a ton of data and pictures in iCloud. The new M1 Macs were familiar in many ways.
This is the biggest difference when you compare the Intel transition to the Apple silicon move: billions of iPhones have been sold over the years, to what are almost exclusively PC users, ironically. Now, a bunch of those PC users are moving to long-battery life Apple laptops with ARM chips in them. In 2006 and 2007, other than Macs, Apple was lucky to sell people a carrier-locked iPhone to a subset of available markets, or an iPod.
What comes NeXT?
The question is whether Apple will make their own processors up until the next decade or continue doing it as long as they possibly can. Will there be a new transition, away from ARM? What about RISC-V? Only time will tell, but for now: let’s enjoy the Apple silicon’s breakthrough performance and battery life.
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