Anyone got a line on how many computers Apple shipped in their PowerPC era?
that's 1994-2006, 12 years. I want to know how many in total they sold.

this says in 2006 they sold 4.5 million computers, and implies that this is a recent high.
so... 12*4.5 = 54 million as a guess at an upper bound?

https://www.forbes.com/forbes/2006/0130/043.html

This Apple Is Too Shiny

The fashionable iPod has made Apple Computer beloved on Wall Street. But that success has hidden an off-key note: It's eroding the company's profitability.

Forbes
okay lets be generous and say that number is way too low and they sold twice as many, at 108 million powerPC computers.

So here's the fun thing:

The Nintendo Wii sold 101 million consoles.
The Xbox 360 sold over 81 million consoles.
The Nintendo Gamecube and Wii U add another 21 million and 14 million consoles.
All those consoles are PowerPC!

WHICH MEANS that Apple only managed to ship enough PowerPC Macs to about match the Nintendo Wii.
And all three PowerPC Nintendo consoles easily outsold all PowerPC macs.

So if you had a PowerPC chip in your house, it was most likely Nintendo's fault, not Apple's.

oh and another 87 million PS3s. forgot those
@foone if you calculate the sales of PS2s that had the weird franken-PPC with some guts of the PS1 CPU implanted in it (second slim revision (SCPH-7500x) and onward, introduced Nov. 2005), that's on the order of another 50 million on top of all that!
@foone don't forget the PS3 Cell processor as well!
@foone Playstation 3 sold 87.4 million
@foone the PS3 was also powerpc based
@foone Can confirm (or corroborate to be more accurate):
I have 2 Nintendo PowerPCs and 0 Apple PowerPCs

@foone how dare you forget about my beloved PlayStation 3

87 million consoles, it just about outsold the Xbox 360

Counting my collection I’m at 6 PPC devices: 3 consoles, 3 Macintosh

@foone the PS3’s non-weird “PPE” CPU bit of the Cell processor was PowerPC too, so there’s another 87m+ there!
@cloudthethings @foone the PS3's PPE core was a modified version of the xbox 360's core too.

@foone btw, ST and Freescale/NXP once worked together on a line of PowerPC automotive microcontrollers and ECUs

I don't have any sales numbers on these, but, they're probably also not that low either. maybe there's more PPC chips in people's cars than in people's homes!

@foone I have most of the aforementioned PowerPCs (lack the Gamecube, although I do group the Wii with that).

Also, my Turris 1.1 router is PowerPC. This toot goes from me to you through a PowerPC. That's guaranteed.

@foone hat means I have several, from Nintendo (3) but also Apple (1)
@foone I have a GameCube, a Wii, a Wii U, a PS3, and a G5. The G5 is the only one that's not hooked up to anything. What do I win?
@foone So many Cell architecture washing machines that never came to be
@foone
I would blame printer companies. They still have ppc ;)
@mwfc @foone HP printers were ARM based. HP sold that business to Marvell (they are based in boise idaho). That group in Marvell is still and is now part of the processor and custom compute group.

@pinskia
Kyocera used ppc (and ARM) and are quite widespread
I thought I saw them in other ones as well and oki is another one.

@foone

@foone joke is on you - got both a PowerMac G4 and a Wii. Apparently, both use reasonably similar CPUs.

TBF, only got the Wii because I got a bit over excited with my good results on PPC.

"It was a birthday present to my wife".
I did get some Zelda games for her, to sweeten the deal, but I end up doing much more homebrew on it then her going thru Hyrule.

@montyontherun yeah I had both too. Mine was a G3 though
@montyontherun @foone AFAIK the Wii CPU is closer to the G3 than the G4. Also the PS3 SPU cores are in a weird middle ground where they have AltiVec but don't have branch prediction, making them sort of a mix-and-match.
@foone i mean, i started getting powerpc macs to port NT to because i saw one that was cheaper than a usb gecko, so...
@Rairii @foone wait do people earnestly still use usb geckos for gcn/wii/wiiu stuff these days?
@pcy @foone when working on my NT port to Wii I added support for NT kernel debugging over usb gecko. Mainly because dolphin supported it and an NDEV is even more expensive.

...recently I was given more info about the hardware bug I was hitting, but I'd need to refactor a lot of the port in any case...
@Rairii @pcy @foone I’m still convinced building a usb gecko clone using the rp2040 or the rp2350 should be possible tbh
@sven @Rairii @foone yeah that seems like a relatively good option to me as well
@Rairii @foone @pcy I am sooo tempted to do a trial with a random USB gecko I can find...
@foone I think even that probably overstates Apple's share of PowerPC sales. They switched to Intel partly because IBM's PowerPC roadmap didn't fit Apple's needs, and Apple's sales were too small for IBM to care. Besides the game systems there were tons of embedded applications, which is why the old CodeWarrior IDE for Macs ended up dropping Mac support for embedded development.
@foone (of course NeXT/Apple Project Builder also had more than a little to do with CodeWarrior's change of focus)

@foone Similar calculations can be made for MOS' 6500 series.

The most sold 6500 computer the C64 totalled 12.5 m according to Michael Steil. Even tripling that to account for floppy drives makes it less than 40 m. Let's make it 50 to include all other 6502 based Commodore.

Famicom/NES alone sold 62m, SNES adding another 50m. Ataris 2600 only adds a mere 30m. So yes, chances are good that a 6500 in your house is a console ... except:

WDC claims:

"Annual volumes in the hundreds (100's) of millions of units keep adding in a significant way to the estimated shipped volumes of five (5) to ten (10) billion units."

A number dwarfing all consoles combined.

Bottom line, in average every human on this planes owns a 6500, without knowing about.

@Computeum @foone what's WDC in this context?

@oblomov Western Design Center, maker of 65xx CPUs.

https://www.westerndesigncenter.com/

Western Design Center | 6502, 65816 Microprocessors, IC, IP and Boards

Western Design Center offers 6502 and 65816 microprocessors, Intel MAX-10 FPGA boards, and licensing of 6502 and 65816 IP. Get legendary microprocessors and IC boards for your projects.

@foone Don't forget the 90 million PS3s. Even though Sony chose some bullshit terms to describe the architecture, it was basically a PowerPC 970 (called G5 by Apple).
@foone its very fun to see this w PPC, ive often thought abt it for MIPS with gur n64/ps1/ps2/psp (and sorta ps3 since afaik it has gur ps1 cpu), im p sure that on average gur most likely MIPS machine in homes during gur 2000s was a games console (or maybe a router if you had one)

@foone some of my PowerPCs are Cisco's fault (I think my 2811 and 2600s are PowerPC, if only some oddball SOC)

Of course I have a 2511, which has 68030 and can trace its vintage back to Cisco's first product.

@foone At least one of mine was from Power Computing Corporation.
@foone don’t forget all the Freescale/NXP embedded devices. Tons of SCADA devices/early IoT/controllers all run Book-E PPC embedded stuff. I’m not terrifically happy that NXP seems more interested in their ARM portfolio at the expense of the POWER QUICC and other early embedded SoCs.
@foone with my gaming console and vintage mac collections combined i'm pretty sure powerPC is the most prevalent architecture in the entire house by far
@foone I used to own a Powerbook G4 12", but I have never owened any video game console other than an XBox (the original one which was just called XBox, nothing more), and that one I modded to run Linux so I could use it as a server and media centre/living-room PC. I'm not into console games at all, I only play computer games, the ones you control via keyboard and mouse. Mostly ones that don't need you to be quick and react immediately or get killed, but ones where you need to take your time to think. Puzzle games. Point&click adventure games. Turn-based strategy games. Computer versions of board games. That kind of stuff.

@foone I haven't had a PowerPC Mac since I got rid of my PowerMac G5 back in (I think) 2010

However at present I have a GameCube, a Wii, a PlayStation 3, and a WiiU. No XBox 360 though.

I also want to shout out MIPS, which lives in N64, Playstation 1, Playstation 2 (which I have three of for dumb reasons, and each of those has *two* MIPS CPUs in it), and the Dingoo A320. Which has nothing to do with Apple but it's still funny that I have more of them than PowerPCs.

@foone perhaps the numbers are skewed a little further in favour of games consoles over Apple by distribution of those sales.
Lots of games consoles went into homes while fewer went into offices. On the other hand, a significant portion of Macs stayed in offices.
@foone is there instruction to install a linux on a wii?
@foone In my house currently, I have at least 10. Only one is from a Nintendo system. IIRC, just under half of them are in/from two Macs (G3 upgrade cards).
@foone retro georg who has ten thousand ppc era macs is an outlier and should not have been be counted.
@foone PowerPC is still common in aerospace. Even new devices will still use what are essentially the same chips as came in Macs in the late 90's and early 00's.
@foone you say “fault” like the PPC infiltration was a bad thing. 😁
@foone
Or Boeing's fault, if a 737 max crashed into it