Sculley: Apple Should Have Picked Intel

MOUNTAIN VIEW, Calif. -- Apple Computer should have adopted the Intel architecture when it had the chance, former chief John Sculley says, upon reflection.

RISC Over CISC

In the late 1980s, when Apple was using Motorola 68000-series chips and considering its next step, Intel cofounder Andy Grove tried to convince the company to migrate to Intel chips, Sculley said at a conference this week. He drew a standing-room-only crowd at the Silicon Valley 4.0 conference, at the Computer History Museum here.

An experienced team from Apple studied the idea but turned it down, Sculley said. Apple concluded that Intel's Complex Instruction Set Computer (CISC) architecture ultimately would not be able to compete against Reduced Instruction Set Computer (RISC) processors, which had a more advanced instruction set, he said. Apple later adopted RISC.

"That's probably one of the biggest mistakes I've ever made, not going to the Intel platform," said Sculley, Apple's former chairman and chief executive officer. He is now a partner in the New York investment firm Sculley Brothers LLC.

Volume Discount Missed

As it turned out, Intel was able to keep its CISC architecture and bring the RISC instruction set into it. What Apple had underestimated was the power of Intel's overall system as a manufacturer, bringing billions of dollars to bear on the problem and solving it through evolution, Sculley said.

"They never had to do a heart transplant," he said.

Had Apple switched to the Intel platform, the company would have had more options, he said. For one thing, not embracing the endless commoditization of Intel-architecture chips meant Apple couldn't compete on price against "the Dells of the world," he said. The die was cast. Apple took another path and ended up a different kind of company, Sculley said.

A smaller one, perhaps, as even its fans acknowledge.