Macs now use the same Intel chips found in “PCs.” The last version of Mac OS X to even run on PowerPCs at all was Mac OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard back in 2009. This wasn’t just swapping out a chip manufacturer - Mac OS transitioned from being a PowerPC operating system to being an x86 operating system. In 2006, Apple began transitioning Macs to run on Intel’s x86 chips instead of the PowerPC architecture. That’s why a computer that came with OS/2 or BeOS could be considered a PC, but a Mac wasn’t a PC - it wasn’t “PC-compatible.” The difference wasn’t just the operating system, it was the architecture. PowerPC was a completely different architecture, so Windows just couldn’t install on a Mac, and Mac OS just couldn’t install on a PC. Where those Wintel PCs had Intel x86-compatible chips inside, Macs had PowerPC chips. In the past, a Macintosh’s hardware was very different from a PC’s. “PC” may be synonymous with Windows to many people, but it shouldn’t be - Linux is also a PC operating system.

There have been other PC operating systems like IBM OS/2 and BeOS, too. PCs originally ran DOS, and today many PCs run Linux.

But there was nothing intrinsically Windows-only about a PC. People continued to use the term “PC” for those Windows-on-Intel-x86 machines. “Wintel” PCs replaced them - Windows-compatible PCs with an Intel x86 chip inside. IBM PCs became less common and eventually vanished, so the term”IBM PC-compatible” fell out of favor.

Is windows a mac or a pc