The big question for new Mac: will it run Windows?

With all the diehard Mac geeks out there, it is only a matter of time.

How does the .mac team write so fast? (Every post was made at 9:00 AM) And no comments? Fauxblog I say.

Robert,

It’s funny, when you wrote “Engadget is reporting that the new Mac will only run Vista”, I thought to myself, what about OSX?!

Then I thought about it. You mean that it won’t run any Microsoft OS older than Vista.

Made me do a double-take.

I bet you wished that you blogged for apple instead of msft.

Why BOTHER installing windows…..when you’ll be able to soon run windows apps within OS X in the near future. X86 runs fast on X86 – you guys are missing the big picture.

http://darwine.opendarwin.org//

You know what’s funny? The .mac blog doesn’t even render properly in Safari — or at least I have a horizontal scrollbar showing that the page width is about 3000 pixels wide.

Very poor…

I have heard (via http://www.osx86project.org/ ) that xp 64 will also work on the new MacTel. Something about the MacTel doesn’t use a BIOS, but EFI. And XP 64 and Vista will work with EFI, but no other Window OSs will…

i wonder if the iweb blog product produces partial feeds as well!

The Big Question for Vista: will it catch up with Mac OS X?

John: Blogging for apple? What could an apple blogger write about? They are hush about anything and everything until they release a product.

#10. Thank you very much. The last thing on my mind was will it run windows? Why the hell would I care about that? There is no reason.

#10. Thank you very much. The last thing on my mind was will it run windows? Why the hell would I care about that? There is no reason.

Running Windows, like it or not, is a selling point. As lots of corporates, and lots of people like me, that would love having a dual machine, need not give up anything. But that’s still a small minority of the market. Most mainstream types aren’t OS specific, it’s what their apps run on, and most things run on Windows. But then having Final Draft, FCP, Motion and all on a dual Vista and OSX machine? Downright heavenly. Darned shame that the two companies have to war, if they’d partnership, both could win.

Christopher: I’m definitely considering an Apple machine to run Windows Vista on. We have employees who have already purchased them. It’ll be interesting to see what happens.

Here’s one response from a guy who has done a lot of homework on this issue:

++++++++++++++
I read on your blog that you’re trying to find out whether the new Macs will boot Windows. I’ve spent a fair bit of time looking into this and talking with Steve Makofsky over in Windows Incubation (another Mac enthusiast) about it. Here’s what I’ve learned:

As Engadget reported, Windows XP won’t boot; however, they omitted some details. Apparently Apple has chosen not to implement CMS, which would enable legacy operating systems to boot. As their article states, 32-bit Windows XP doesn’t support EFI. You can read more about EFI and CMS at the following sites:
http://www.microsoft.com/whdc/system/platform/firmware/default.mspx
http://www.intel.com/technology/framework/overview4.htm

Even if Windows Vista does implement EFI, or if some inspired hacker comes up with a way to add CMS to Apple’s firmware, there’s still the problem that the new MacBooks come with some Apple-specific hardware such as the keyboard backlight, the one-button trackpad, and the embedded iSight camera. Until Apple implements Windows drivers for their hardware, these won’t work. (It’s possible that other hardware, such as the fans, battery, ExpressCard/34, and network controller are part of a standard Intel chipset that would already have drivers, at least in Vista. Or they might also require new drivers. Without more details from Apple about the hardware, we can’t know.)

Microsoft’s MacBU is working on an updated Virtual PC for the Intel Macs. No date promised yet though. See http://www.microsoft.com/presspass/features/2006/jan06/01-10MacWorld.mspx

Chris nails it.

Gates originally offered partnersip to Jobs (I forgot the details, but it was something to do with Gates asking Jobs to make the GUI a multi-platform OS (ironically the term ‘open’ meant something different at the time) and thus Apple would essentially become a software business together with Microsoft (Gates tried to convince Jobs that hardware would become commodified) but Jobs felt that Gates was wrong and that “staying hardware” would make Apple big and Microsoft small.

Phil Schiller at Apple says Macbook pro can run windows.
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/10794396/from/RS.3/

Apple has repeatedly said they’ll be neutral, neither helping nor hindering Windows running on the Intel Macs.

A couple of other notes here:
For hardware, the Mac stuff, though in some ways proprietary still has “open” standards with firewire. The iSight, to my understanding, is a more standard firewire device.

The mouse should be similar in that aspect. The keyboard, well, that’s questionable, but I’d imagine mostly standard, minus the backlighting. However, that could probably be ignored as an unknown device. Depends on how they’ve implemented it.

Altogether, Vista should run on one of these fine. Some things probably won’t work – i.e. the backlight, but most things should work fine – the display, network (broadcom if I remember correctly… it’s a public chipset though), wireless cards, etc. etc.

Additionally, on Virtual PC, VMware is working on a version of their software for OS X – so that’s always an option. Additionally, Xen virtualization and other technologies should allow the option of running windows regardless.

Being a heavy user of both OS X and Windows… why on earth would I want to run Windows on that machine? What a waste!

Diego: because I have lots of software that runs on Windows. Plus, believe it or not, I like Windows Vista better than OSX. Anyway, what does it hurt to have another OS on your hard drive?

Robert: Seriously though, I just think it would make for very interesting blogging if you were to get a Mac and give it a try. Of course, to blog about it.

Diego: Channel 9 owns a Mac. My brother-in-law works on the Mac team and I regularly get to pay with Macs (like every other week). I’m well versed on them (I used to be a Mac evangelist back before it was cool to be one).

Robert: OK, thanks for the info. Didn’t (obviously) know. Cheers.