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Windows on Intel Macs - Yes or No?
With the announcement of the Intel chip based MacBook, the door is now open for running the Windows OS on Macintosh hardware, right? jaypatrick writes "BetaNews reports that along with the announcement of the first Intel based Macs yesterday, many users have rejoiced in being able to dual-boot both Mac OS X and Windows. Unfortunately, this is not the case; due to Apple's use of the extensible firmware interface (EFI) rather than BIOS, current Windows releases will not run on the systems." I guess not. But, wait... Big Z writes "Phil Schiller, Apple's senior vice-president of worldwide product marketing, said in an interview Tuesday that the company won't sell or support Windows itself, but also hasn't done anything to preclude people from loading Windows onto the machines themselves." I think someone actually trying it out is the only way this is going to get straightened out.
Well, the thing I really want to see is someone tri-boot, OSX, linux and WindowsXP. Obligitory: I wonder what a beowulf cluster of these could do.
Mmmh.. I dont think Mac users will migrate. Why would they do that?
Could grub or lilo be built on the osx side to handle this?
The real question is, how well will WINE/Cedega work on the new Macs? I know a lot of Mac people who want to play PC games, and this could well be their chance. Contrawise, I know a lot of people who'd love a Mac, but the games issue is what's stopping them from moving over.
Isn't there a shell in EFI that will let you emulate BIOS? You should just have to configure EFI to launch the BIOS shell.
You say things that offend me and I can deal with it. Can you?
Why oh why use EFI instead of OpenFirmware?
Leandro Guimarães Faria Corcete DUTRA
DA, DBA, SysAdmin, Data Modeller
GNU Project, Debian GNU/Lin
For Windows IT managers out there that are sick and tired of being sick and tired, running Windows on a Mac may help in the transition from an all Windows based office to all Mac. Granted... it is not ideal (nor do I think an 'ideal' exists). However, it will go a long way towards justification of a switch if there is no downside such as needing to retain some Windows boxes for legacy application after the switch.
I predict, though, that the Dell drones (and the like) will not find this anything more than a curiosity, and will not be able to take seriously the idea of switching platforms no matter how bad Windows has botched a situation. They are so ingrained in their problems they don't know it just doesn't have to be that way. Poor Bastards.
The Admin and the Engineer
The benefits of a port might be because of cheaper or easier to find hardware capable of running something that it wasn't meant to but is very useful to users. I don't think this is the case in putting Windows on an Intel Mac because Intel Macs are cheaper than what I can piece together in PC x86 form. Don't get me wrong, Macs are nice machines but they're not exactly easy to upgrade or fix on your own.
Windows will run on EFI eventually (some versions do now). EFI supports BIOS compatible partitions. The only issue is you need a clue to install Windows. Imaging an existing Windows install is probably the easiest route. People will do this because they want to be able to dual boot to play games, for testing, or to run some particular rarely needed application. As to the comments about Macs not being easy to upgrade and fix, you're way off. Macs are easier to upgrade and fix, provided you buy the right parts and you're comparing the same kinds of machines. imacs aren't particularly easy, but neither are any all in one machines. Their laptops are about the same as any other. Their towers are easier. I have an older g4 tower that serves as my PVR. When I want to add another drive I take out one screw and the whole drive chassis pulls out. Opening the case is as easy as lifting the latch and the whole side of the housing hinges down, with half the parts mounted on it. It is so much easier to work on than any PC I have ever owned that there is just no comparison.
So which way to the first full dual booting machine? Some hacking to get around Windows EFI issues to get a dual booting mac going, or full shipping OSX hacked to real functionality on Generic PC's?
Yeah I know OSX on generics has been done, but to keep the race fair lets make it official shipping OSX which is suppossed to be harder to hack.
Personally I am interested in a new dual booting machine and would prefer the windows on Mac option as that probably needs less hacking to get it to work and will likely be more stable.
Slightly off-topic, but does the new firmware support target disk mode?
Heh.
But really, once Windows XP and Linux are booting on a Mac, I doubt many developers in the world will ever buy anything else. This might be the unseen shift everyone has been waiting for - now you can get a decently performing dual processor machine that runs nearly every OS for less than $1300. With a 500GB internal drive on an iMac, Linux/Windows/Tiger can live comfortably.
Remember, once Mac applications are running natively on Intel, it won't be too hard to port them to windows, and vice versa. If Apple ever releases an XCode that will wrap Windows widgets around Objective-C... kinda close to game over.
All the problems with windows on a really expensive machine. Great! I'm failing to see the benefit here.
It's great for that one (or more) Windows app you have to run. In my case, its the VPN software for work. I currently run Win2k in VMWare on Linux for that, but it'd be nice if I could do the same in OS X.
I don't think it'll be that hard. All we have to do is get GRUB working on the thing and I bet Windows running the ACPI Uniprocessor HAL will pick up the devices. GRUB has an EFI port, IIRC.
Yes, okay GRUB will probably work but what does that buy you? All GRUB will do is immediately hand control to the Windows boot loader and then get out of the way. At which point you are straight back to the Windows boot loader trying to run on an EFI machine. It's not like GRUB can bypass the initial querying of the BIOS that Windows will do. There's no "Stage 1.5" or "Stage 2" boot loader for Windows that GRUB can pass control to, if that's what you're thinking of.
Yeah, Windows on a Mac would be cool, but what about running MacOSX on a home built PC? How long will it be before someone figures out a PC configuration that will run OSX?
In general, people know that the Apple machines are good computers, but they don't run Windows and they are more expensive. Apple makes their money selling hardware with good software.
Mark my words! Very soon, Apple will have a machine that will run the MAC OS-X and will also run Windows-XP, so people now will be able to buy a machine that runs a good OS (opinion)and also runs the most popular OS (fact). Apple's market share will go up-up-up. The normal MAC purchaser will still be there but will now be able to use those "Windows only" programs like autocad, etc. The "Windows" purchaser will now be able to consider a MAC with the better (perceived?) hardware and software. Present MAC users will not be converted to Windows, but Windows users may be converted to the MAC OS.
Now for the other part. If Windows can be made to run on a MAC using the X86 architecture, then the MAC OS-X can be made to run on PC hardware using the X86 architecture. Now, Apple starts selling software to the rest of the PC industry, and again their market share goes-up-up-up.
If you had a choice of purchasing a PC from HP with both the MAC OS-X and Windows XP, would you consider doing so?
So here it is:
1. MAC will be running OS-X and Windows within two years.
2. MAC will be selling OS-X to manufacturers of PC's within three years, and some machines will have both OS's.
3. We will have a choice of desktops from MAC and/or Windows, and one OS will open from a window of the other.
4. OS-X will be running on AMD's faster architecture within three years.
Sadly, I don't see any benefit to Linux here, because the Linux community, like the Unix community of 20 years ago, is still fragmented into a half dozen main players. If Linux is to be a major player any time soon, it will have to get in there with the other two main OS's and be content to either triple boot, or be part of a "run it in a window" system.
Where will MS be while all this is going on? They will be trying to push a new OS that is not compatible with the present OS and will be stopping support for everything that is on a MAC system or that has a MAC OS. There will be lawsuits that will tie things up for years, and they are in a much better position to do so than SCO vs Linux.
Well .... yeah, you wouldn't want to use the SAME VERSION of VPC that you're using now. That would be missing the point, since you'd be going:
x86 --(VPC)--> PPC --(Rosetta)--> x86
Now assuming that each time you take a 20% hit due to emulation, you've lost 40% speed. The solution is for Microsoft to make a VPC version for x86 Mac and rip out the first instruction conversion, and just provide the hardware abstraction.
What we really need is a port of Wine to Mac OS X86 -- a wrapper around the Windows DLLs and system calls, but that doesn't do any microcode conversion. That way you wouldn't need Windows. I have read this idea on the Cedega and WineHQ forums several times, but a lot of the regular Linux Wine/Cedega users aren't interested because they don't want the resources diverted from "their" platform.
However if you could do this, even if it didn't involve any VM functionality, it would be huge. Virtual PC's problem (to me) was always twofold: one it was slow, and two it required buying a Windows license. The first one is problem for games and the second just a problem for me personally, and I'm sure many other users would prefer not buying Windows, if not for ethical or preference reasons than just for financial ones. It's always a game of catch-up between the Wine people and Microsoft to reverse engineer the new features and keep compatibility, but it's one that the developer community seems to be up to, at least on Linux. Given the potential benefit to Mac users everywhere, I think at least equal support could be mustered as well.
Ever since I started playing around with Linux x86, I've been very impressed with what Wine/Cedega does. If we could implement that on the Mac x86 platform, we'd really have a killer app on our hands. Potentially it could offer all the benefits of Virtual PC or a dual-boot install, at nearly full speed without rebooting, and without having to buy or run Windows.
"Ladies and gentlemen, my killbot features Lotus Notes and a machine gun. It is the finest available."
I'm glad somebody else thought of this.
I think the Wine on OS X86 has huge potential; the whole dual-boot thing, while interesting, is a kludge. If you want to run Windows applications -- which is assumedly the only reason anyone would want to run Windows on a Mac anyway (you're not doing it for the OS, or you wouldn't have gotten the Mac in the first place, right?) -- let's just work on a way to run Windows applications from within Mac OS X. We're already partway there with Wine/Cedega. Granted it's buggy and doesn't always work, but you have to give them credit for being pretty slick. Depending on which application is being used, sometimes people claim performance that's better than Windows.
I have no idea of how the actual underpinnings of Wine works, other than it does some very high-level emulation and virtualization (much higher than, say, VPC), but the WineHQ is open source, and in theory it should be able to be ported to OS X86 now. Can anyone familiar with WineHQ comment on what would need to be done, or how big an effort would be required?
To me, that would be pretty close to the perfect solution. A compatibility environment for running Windows applications without rebooting into (or even buying) Windows, and without the performance overhead of emulation or translation (however it is how you define Virtual PC).
TransGaming doesn't seem as though they have the resources or interest to do it, which I think is a mistake because there could be a big market for a Windows gaming emulator on Macintosh, but they seem to be totally occupied with maintainance and improvement on the Linux-x86 side. So it seems as though the WineHQ project would be the logical port choice.
Thoughts?
"Ladies and gentlemen, my killbot features Lotus Notes and a machine gun. It is the finest available."
I would never try to convince someone to by a $70k BMW... but I would like to mention that some of us do actually _like_ to drive... and enjoy owning cars that enhance our driving experience.
;-)... and are willing to pay for vehicles that enhance that enjoyment.
;-)
;-)
I understand that many people just need a "people mover" and don't care much about what happens between when they get in their car and when they arrive at their destination....
Some of us though _enjoy_ the trip itself (yes _even_ sitting in traffic
I, myself, don't own an overly expensive car... I try to maxiimize my fun/dollars ratio for maximum impact (I drive a used Subaru WRX that I got for about $15k). But I could see myself owning a BMW at some point (probably not a really expensive one... again trying to maximize driving experience/dollar ratio).
My wife on the other hand _hates_ driving. A nice car wouldn't even help... she just doesn't want to do it. She doesn't care about "hugging turns", having a nice interior, good sound system, low road noise or whatever else. She is just trying to get to a destination. Therefore she drives a Honda Civic... it gets her where she wants to go and minimizes gas usage (right behind hating driving she also _hates_ getting gas
Now of course some people just buy nice cars so they can feel important in them (and just because they "can")... but all I'm trying to portray is that there are some of us that buy nice cars for other reasons.
To bring this back on topic... many people like different things about computers... and have different computing needs. I personally like a highly personalized computing environment... and therefore use Linux. My wife just wants it to work... and cheaply... so she uses Windows. Others like a more aesthetically pleasing desktop that works slightly differently from either windows or linux and therefore they buy macs (of course there are other reasons...).
Use what makes you happy.... but rest assured that there will be someone out there who will have a "need" to use Windows on a MacBook. I personally wouldn't mind having a MacBook that could tripple boot Linux/Windows/OSX.... if not for any other reason other than "I can"
Friedmud
In reality because she doesn't have computer skills. She is a trained monkey. I love her to death, but she just doesn't get it.
I have tried and tried to teach computing concepts to her, she doesn't understand them at all. The concepts of downloading and installing are the same to her. After much time, and much repeating, she can perform the tasks she wants to because she repeats a memorized process. If I move her task bar from the bottom to the top she can't do anything. When I changed her browser from IE to Firefox it took her all of Christmas vacation to get it down.
I live out of town and cannot explain on a daily basis to her the simularities of the green/yellow/red and the line/windows/cross. Not only do the concepts of minimize, maximize, and resize not register - but she would get hung up on them being on the other side. Let's not get into the fact that none of the programs having the same name or the fact that OSX doesn't use double click.
There are different types of users out there. The type that memorizes a process without understanding the underlying concepts will have a much harder time converting than someone who understands the concepts and can fiddle around with the GUI for a few moments to get the desired commands to execute.
Windows was made for my Mom and I'm ok with that. But she still wants her laptop to "look cool."