John Sculley Clarifies Comments For TMO About Apple Using Intel

by , 10:00 AM EDT, October 14th, 2003

Former Apple CEO John Sculley sent us a note to clarify some comments he made, as well as TMO's interpretation of those comments, at the Silicon Valley 4.0 conference earlier this month. Our story was a reference article that quoted C|Net's coverage of the conference. From that coverage, we included the following:

At the same time, Apple was making decisions that would come to haunt it, Sculley said. It chose not to adopt Intel chips, for instance.

"It was probably one of the biggest strategic mistakes Apple ever made," he said. Sculley also complimented Microsoft Chairman Bill Gates and Michael Dell, founder of computer maker Dell.

In our Spin, we offered the following opinion regarding those comments:

As for adopting Intel early on, we are surprised to hear that from someone who was in the thick of things as the Mac was nearing its release. When Apple developed and introduced the Mac, Intel didn't have a processor capable of doing what the Mac needed. The 68k processor from Motorola was light-years ahead of Intel's x86 line of chips, just as the PowerPC was light years ahead of the 486 or Pentium processor when it was released. There is a legitimate case to be made for Apple switching to Intel in the last few years, though such a case would be wrong, but embracing Intel for the original Mac? Not possible.

Curious comments indeed.

It turns out, according to Mr. Sculley, that we were taking his comments completely out of context. He wrote to us with the following note:

Hi Bryan and Vern,

I read your Macobserver.com article which attributed a comment to me about Intel and Apple from our panel at Silicon Valley 4.0 and wanted to clear up some confusion in your reporting.

The example I gave was about Apple's decision on what would come after the end-of-life on the Motorola 68,000.

In 1992, Apple was faced with an end-of-life for the 68k around 1993/94. At that time, it took about 3 years to do a "heart transplant" of the Mac OS to a new instruction set since the Mac OS was written in assembler and porting tools were still pretty primitive in the early 1990's. Meanwhile Intel was migrating from "integer arithmetic" to "floating point", because Windows needed floating point in order to be more like the Mac. Your reporter was correct that the only processor that the "original Mac" could have run on was the Motorola 68k, but I was telling the audience about a decision Apple made in 1992, not 1982!

Maybe your reporter wasn't in the audience and got my comments second hand.

All the Best,

John

Mr. Sculley was right: We were not in the audience, we did take those comments out of context, and we appreciate the clarification.

The Mac Observer Spin:

There are many who have disagreed with some of the decisions John Sculley made during his tenure at Apple, but few would ever argue that he wasn't an intelligent man. The idea that Apple could have chosen an Intel solution for the original Mac was indeed an illogical idea. Since contradictions don't exist, we should perhaps have reexamined our premises, instead of jumping on Mr. Sculley. Fortunately, that's all cleared up now.

That said, we find the thought of Apple moving to Intel in the 93/94 time frame to still be an interesting discussion. Would it have helped Apple? Do not make the mistake of thinking that this would have meant Apple ceasing to make hardware: Macs would no doubt have continued to be controlled by ROMs, keeping you from running the Mac OS on a Compaq, Packard-Bell, or Tandy. So, would that have helped?

Remember that Motorola's processors were far superior to Intel's until about 2000, and even then they maintained a parity for a bit longer. It was after the year 2000 when Intel began pulling away in the MHz war, really leaving Apple's product line behind during the last 18-24 months. Was it a problem before that? Perhaps to some, and perhaps being part of the "industry standard" would have made the Mac more palatable to the masses.

If so, however, we wouldn't have had fanless iMacs, super powerful laptops like the PowerBook G4, and today we wouldn't have the G5, a chip that does indeed seem to be the most powerful processor in the desktop market.

It's an interesting topic, to say the least.