> This whole thread reminds me of how passionate the power pc enthousiasts were defending it as superior, right before apple switched to intel and doubled mac performance overnight.
To be fair, the PowerPCs _were_ measurably better and faster when each one was released. Apple just couldn't get a G5 CPU that would fit into a laptop, and IBM was an unreliable partner with a slow release cycle, so by the time the transition happened they had fallen behind.
The PowerPC G3 and G4 were great chips. The G3 was much better than competing x86 chips, and G4 beat contemporary ones consistently too.
The G5 wasn't great though. When Steve Jobs announced it, Apple already showed it only trading blows with the then-current Pentium 4 (a Pentium 4 - they sucked!). And a few months after the first Power Mac G5s were launched, they were already resoundly beaten by the new Athlon 64s [1].
Add to that the G5 was basically a POWER4 server chip, and IBM was only building server chips in the future, Apple basically had no choice. Nothing really to do with PowerPC vs x86, but more to do with what kind of processors their suppliers were willing to build.
That was probably the last PPC they did and was probably ready when Apple made the announcement. It just wasn't worth for IBM to invest in workstation-class PowerPC chips with laptop power envelopes. The only other use for PowerPCs, from their PoV, was their own workstations and those could use the higher end POWER chips.
IBM continued making PowerPC G3 derivatives for a while for Nintendo. Nintendo ended Wii U production in January 2017, which would I guess would mark the end of IBM's production of PowerPC as well.
The Wii U for all its flaws is probably the most "practical" Power-based machine you can get nowadays, given relative power, availability, size and price. A 1.2GHz triple core PowerPC G3 would probably still eek out Raspberry Pi 3 like performance. Shame the Linux port to it never really got off the ground (also partially due to IBM's hackjob of an SMP implementation for the G3).
To be fair, the PowerPCs _were_ measurably better and faster when each one was released. Apple just couldn't get a G5 CPU that would fit into a laptop, and IBM was an unreliable partner with a slow release cycle, so by the time the transition happened they had fallen behind.