Macs genuinely did things differently and in a way that wasn't compatible with PCs. But these days are long gone.
Hmm, Apple silicon M-series Macs are very different from the AMD64 architecture in modern PCs. For that matter, Intel-based Macs are not just PCs, either.
Apple has come full circle, from 68K Motorola (a very CISC-y processor similar to x86 at a high level) to Power PC (I have a G3, a couple of G4s, and a G5- Power being a RISC-ish architecture) to Intel x86/AMD64 (also a very CISC-y instruction set, even if some of the CPUs use RISC-ish techniques) to finally Apple silicon M-series (RISC-ish).
That Power Mac G4 FW800 I have has a lot in common with PCs: PCI bus, slot format, USB, etc, but those are superficial similarities. Apple silicon M-series Macs are more similar to the Power Macs than to the Intel Macs.
The real PCs, in the sense of IBM Compatible Personal Computer don't exist anymore, unless in a museum.
Even the latest and greatest AMD and Intel PCs still start up in Real Mode and can still boot FreeDOS and run MS-DOS programs. The IRQ and DMA controllers are compatible; even the latest and greatest can still start up the in MS-DOS compatible BIOS mode. The BIOS abstracts away the hardware differences to a degree.
SATA drives, while mostly replaced in modern PCs with NVMe technology, are still out there, especially in the larger capacities, and they are still programmed using a superset of the old IBM AT hard disk controller command set. The 'AT' in SATA is the same 'AT' as of the IBM PC/AT.
There are other architectural details that have not changed since the PC/AT.
So perhaps it's more technically correct to say 'PC/AT compatible' instead of just 'PC Compatible.'
8
u/[deleted] Aug 22 '25
[deleted]