Look at all those Pentium 4 CPU features!Īs a VMM addition, this was a real find. This thing is really a PC with proprietary software pasted on top. Unlike other Macs the hard drive needs to be partitioned using Master Boot Record (MBR), not GUID as used for all shipping Intel-based Macs. When you first start the machine a BIOS screen appears, allowing you to hit F4 and set the boot drive order, system date, etc. As far as these apps are concerned, they’re still running in a PowerPC world. In order to launch third party software you need to check the preference to “Launch using Rosetta” in the Finder’s Get Info window. But despite being an Intel version of Mac OS X Universal applications will not launch in Intel mode, they just bounce a few times in the dock then abort. The processor is a 3.6GHz Pentium 4 with Hyper-Threading. A small logic board labelled Barracuda sits inside a ridiculously large tower (to fool the passers-by). The mothership required all DTS units to be returned after one year, so very few of these hybrid Macs survive outside the gates of Cupertino.
Called Developer Transition Systems (DTS), these Trojan horse “PowerMacs” came with a special developer version of Mac OS X Tiger 10.4.1 for Intel and were leased, not sold, to developers. To allow developers to prepare their own software for the change, Apple designed special Macs with Pentium-based motherboards inside PowerMac G5 cases for testing purposes. Apple had been secretly compiling Mac OS X for Intel shortly after it’s evolution from NeXTstep. So in 2006 Apple stunned the world (again) by announcing they were going over to the Dark Side: the Macintosh was going to switch to Intel processors. These limitations prevented the release of G5 based PowerBooks (though prototypes were rumored to exist), and required Apple to think differently about its future. But by the middle of that decade the G5 was reaching an engineering tradeoff in terms of processing power versus thermal output the fastest Macs ran very hot and required the development of liquid cooling systems.
During the late 1990s and early 2000s the Macintosh was getting more powerful, and for a while the PowerPC G-series CPUs provided more computing power than comparable Intel chips.
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