[jandrese]

It is also notable that the Mac was stagnating just like the Amiga around that time. The successor to OS 9 was delayed for years and years before being cancelled. The hardware was getting more expensive but with only small incremental improvements in speed or capacity. The Centris and early Performa lines were just so mediocre. The 68k architecture was stalling out just as Intel was blowing everyone's doors off with x86. Jobs made a bad bet with PPC, but it was still way better than 68k and gave them enough breathing room to keep up with PCs for a bit.

[scarface_74]

Your history is way off. The PPC line came out in 1994 and was talked about as early as 1993. This wasn’t a rumor. This was Apple’s announce pipeline.

Jobs came back in 1997 and stayed with the PPC line until 2005. By then Apple was far from “beleaguered” thanks to the iMac, PowerBooks and iPod

[KerrAvon]

No, the 68k lineup was competitive or better with x86 for the entire duration of Amiga’s viable lifetime. Apple’s troubles came later, after they had already successfully transitioned to PowerPC.

[DerekL]

Apple switched to PowerPC a few years before the NeXT acquisition and Steve Jobs' return.

[jprival]

Yeah the Power Macintosh line, as the name suggests, introduced PowerPC in 1994. There were Performa versions of those as well. Jobs’ return as CEO roughly coincided with the beginning of the G3 era (calling them that instead of PowerPC 740 is already pretty Jobs-ian).