Power Mac G5

Jobs called it the world's fastest personal computer at WWDC in June 2003, which got the scrutiny it deserved, and underneath the argument sat a genuine architectural jump. Apple left Motorola and went to IBM. The PowerPC 970 came out of the POWER4 server line, and it made the Power Mac G5 the first personal computer sold with a 64-bit processor, about a year before Intel and AMD brought 64-bit to mainstream desktops. The case changed too. Perforated aluminum with grilles front and back, which looked severe and industrial next to the G4 towers and existed because the 970 ran considerably hotter than anything before it. Clocks went from 1.6 to 2.0GHz at launch. A dual 2.5GHz configuration arrived later that needed liquid cooling to stay stable, which is a remarkable thing to ship in a consumer product and caused exactly the reliability problems you would predict once the pumps started failing. Apple's benchmarks against the fastest Pentium 4 machines drew pushback over methodology. The aluminum tower then defined Apple's professional desktop for nearly a decade. The heat did something else, because the G5 never fitted in a laptop, and that is a large part of why Apple announced the move to Intel in 2005.