No, I don't think he was referring to MMX either, when he talked about Intel processors doing graphics. I sincerely think that he simply has no clue about computing or technology.
This gem from the same interview
It was totally remarkable that you could deliver a machine when you think the first processor on the Mac was less than three MIPs (Million Instructions Per Second), which today would be — I can’t think of any device which has three MIPS, or equivalent. Even your digital watch is at least 200 or 300 times more powerful than the first Macintosh.
If the first Mac had 3 MIPS (actually it didn't, it had an 8Mhz 68000 at around 1 MIP, but you can't expect him to know that - he was only the CEO of the company that produced the thing) and an average digital watch today is 300 times faster? He seriously thinks that an average digital watch runs at "at least" 900 MIPS?
The Freescale MPC8272 running at 400Mhz only gives 760 MIPS!
The man is in cloud cuckoo land. He then goes on to say that an i3 is rated at about 40,000 MIPS, so in his World 45 digital watches have the same processing power as an Intel i3
And then this...
Microprocessors in those days were so weak compared to what we had today. In order to do graphics on a screen you had to consume all of the power of the processor. Then you had to glue chips all around it to enable you to offload other functions. Then you had to put what are called “calls to ROM.” There were 400 calls to ROM, which were all the little subroutines that had to be offloaded into the ROM because there was no way you could run these in real time.
He doesn't even seem to be able to grasp the most basic concepts of how computers work. ROM is just storage - the processor still has to run the code that's on them, and it still has to run them in real time, and it did just that. "calls to ROM" are calls in your program code which call these routines stored in the ROM and then the processor runs the code.
Putting graphics on a screen consumed all of the power of the processor? He has obiviously never used an Amiga... hell even a 1979 Atari 800 had graphics chips (GTIA) which handled graphics and did sprites in hardware so as not to use the processor.
On the other hand, Steve led the development of what was called AppleTalk and AppleLink. AppleTalk was the communications that enabled the Macintosh to communicate to the laser printer that enabled… desktop publishing.
Appletalk was a networking protocol to network Apple computers - yes, a part of that protocol meant that you could share printers (just as you can today with TCP/IP) but it was not what 'enabled desktop publishing' by any stretch of the imagination.
What is surprising is not that he got fired, but that he ever got to be CEO in the first place. No wonder the company was in such dire straits at that time with this guy in charge.
