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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.
When something like Linux is ported to anything, it's because there is a cult following in the community and this is what they specialize in. Window's has a cult following, it's just not specialized in this sort of development.
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.
I'm sure someone will port the extended firmware interface to run Windows through a virtual layer (if it needs it) but this can only introduce Windows running as fast or slower than the speed it could run at without EFI.
For this reason, I doubt people are going to find much use using the port since it's a) cheaper to piece their own machine together and leave the specs up to themselves and b) Windows will probably run slower.
Yeah, there might be someone out there bragging about running Windows on an Intel Mac but he's probably the rare Window's equivalent to the guy with a penguin displayed on his microwave's LCD.
My work here is dung.
Apple hasn't done anything to preclude Windows, or any other OS, from being installed on the Intel-based Macs. That is a perfectly accurate statement. Apple Vice President Phil Schiller's two direct quotes on the subject, the most recent which was made on January 10, 2006, can be seen here. Intel has also specifically said that Apple will not be using proprietary chipsets and/or processors, and they'll just represent standard Intel offerings.
;-)
Windows XP would directly boot and install on the Developer Transition Kit platform because it was just a standard Intel motherboard and processor, and also used a standard Intel BIOS.
However, the shipping Intel-based Macs use EFI (Wikipedia article), Intel's "next generation of BIOS". (more info)
Windows XP 32-bit does not currently support EFI for booting. Windows XP 64-bit does, but Intel Core Duo is not a 64-bit chip. Now, there are a bunch of other variables, such as whether or not Apple's current EFI implementation offers BIOS backward-compatibility, and so on, but it's clear that regardless, EFI is the future, and it's only a matter of time before the PC world at large transitions to EFI. Further, Windows Vista does support EFI. See here for Microsoft's presentations on EFI, particularly the first two links.
That said, dual booting is intensely annoying anyway, and the really interesting thing will be able to just run Windows (or some other x86 OS) and Mac OS X side-by-side.
What we will *definitely* see are "Virtual PC"-like programs that let you run Windows alongside OS X (in a Window, or taking over the screen, etc., with a hotkey to flip back and forth, for example).
It's important to note this will NOT be emulation: Windows (or other x86 OS) will run at essentially the native speed of the underlying hardware (with certain exceptions). There could even be direct access to video, with support for things like DirectX.
vmware already has a version for Mac OS X in development, and Microsoft has already announced they will be developing a version of Virtual PC for Intel-based Macs that one can only presume will be a virtual machine. Then there are things like QEMU, Xen, etc. The Darwin/Mac OS X version of WINE, DarWINE, has even been working under betas of Mac OS X for Intel. Now that Intel Macs are shipping, it will only be a matter of weeks/months before we have several options for running Windows itself, and/or Windows applications at essentially the native speed of the underlying hardware.
And since Intel Core Duo also supports Intel's VT hardware virtualization, the possibilities of future virtual machine technology are even more interesting. But the bottom line is that Apple is again leading the way with the adoption of technologies like EFI and ExpressCard. Naturally, it will take a little while for Windows to catch up.
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?
I think it's in Apples best interest to allow Windows on their hardware for two reasons. 1st, people who are apprehensive about switching to Mac could do so slowly with a dual boot setup. 2nd, Apple could sell more hardware this way as it would appeal to Windows users.
http://religiousfreaks.com/Not worried about Linux much, I'm sure that one is already ported.
But unless I can tri-boot the big-3 (or more to the point, VM them), we're all gonna have to keep the Windows XP boxen around for Development (read: games). This is not acceptable, PC's are just too loud and power hungry.
Apple knows this, so does everyone else. By the time they ship, the "problem" will be solved.
- Adam L. Beberg - The Cosm Project - http://www.mithral.com/
They can include support for Legacy BIOS in EFI. If apple includes this option (or if there is a way to flash your bios with legacy bios support) then you WILL be able to boot windows on new mac hardware.
However 64 bit windows and Longhorn both do / will support EFI so that is always a option (although the current intel chips in the macs are 32bit I believe).
...the posts breathlessly announcing "Hackers manage to make Windows run on Apple", "Hackers manage to make Windows run on off the shelf Dell PC", "Hackers manage to make Windows run on X-Box", "Hackers manage make Windows run", complete with little pictures of the device in question displaying something characteristic of Windows....
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.
Dual booting is nice for a play thing, and in some very specific instances, but not as a general practice. There's a lot of hardware you could get that's nearly as nice, for cheaper.
Honestly, what's the draw to this? Back in the mid 90's I understood it completely with windows/linux. Linux didn't provide what most people needed to be productive back then, and costs were prohibitive to have dual machines for most of the people that were interested in linux at the time.
Now we have a high end (and high priced) peice of hardware, that runs an operating system that provides everything you need to be productive, and it's polished as heck. So why would you want to dual boot to anything? You can get the performance out of many other peices of hardware for cheaper if you want to run windows.
What is the purpose of dual booting? In my college days, sure I had 5 OSs booting off the same drive, but that had nothing to do with needing to get work done.
OS X is superior for Web surfing, Document creation, Multimedia and personal file and web serving.
Now I know that there are legitimate uses for Windows (CAD, games, etc) but why would you want to dual boot? A cheap windows machine can be made by your local shop for 400 bucks.
Get a KVM switch and you've got two dedicated machines you can use at the same time.
If you don't know what AltaVista is (was), get off my lawn.
For this reason, I doubt people are going to find much use using the port since it's a) cheaper to piece their own machine together and leave the specs up to themselves and b) Windows will probably run slower.
It's not like the BIOS is a processor architecture. I highly doubt that any work required to make Windows XP work with EFI will not drastically, or even noticably affect the speed of the machine.
GRUB already works with EFI, and GRUB can launch Windows... From my experience, WindowsXP has pretty much ignored anything about the hardware that the bios has told it (I've disabled HDs, but windows sees them, etc). Could it be possible that GRUB could be installed on a Mac and used to load Windows?
Otherwise both WinXP 64 and Vista support EFI... one could always wait for Vista or illegally grab a beta...
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?
Better yet, Windows running on over a million other peoples machines and becoming part of a botnet to DDOS my machine.
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I'm also upset that my nintendo DS won't run the PSP operating system, I mean come on, they're both hand held gaming consoles, I should be able to dual boot, right?! /snark.
EFI has BIOS emulation, so Windows XP should be able to run on a Mac. We'll see what steps are needed to get it installed. You don't even need a bootloader, since EFI replaces bootloaders.
It's gonna happen. But I'm not interested in that--I'm interested in someone taking advantage of the hardware virtualization in the Core Duos and letting me run Windows in a window on an OS X desktop with no performance hit. Screw dual-booting.
"Sufferin' succotash."
Let's face it, one reason people "buy" Windows is that the cost is hidden in the cost of the machine. This is also generally true of OS X (the cost is hidden) but the hardware is "cooler." Your average consumer who buys an Apple does so because of design or ease of use.
In order to run Windows on Mac hardware, it would first be necessary to buy Mac hardware, which isn't cheap. (The value proposition of Macs is a separate issue). Then, you have to look at the OSX interface goodness and decide that you want Windows instead. After that, you have to do whatever porting is necessary and install Windows. All this to get cool hardware running a not-so-cool OS. I mean, Apple is the BMW of computers and Wintel is the Ford. Are you really going to buy a 3 series and stick an Escort engine in it?
If and when Windows supports booting without a BIOS, I can see some folks having dual-boot Apple hardware. Especially folks who want Apple's nicely designed hardware but still want to run Windows games.
But an out-and-out port seems unlikely.
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Yes, the Apple tax is part of buying hardware from Apple. Makes sense to me. Of course if you actually bought a Mac just to run Windows on it exclusively, that would be horribly sad... I can't imagine you actually doing it once you got used to OS X.
I don't jest.
Intel Core Duo is not a 64-bit processor, and does not not support EM64T (x86-64).
The next generation of all of Intel's processors will indeed be 64-bit.
That's one of the transitional kits, provided to developers to test that they've ported the code to Intel processors correctly. They were a hack job, featuring a standard PC motherboard fitted into a G5 PowerMac case, and still featured the normal PC BIOS. Many standard operating system features were missing or incomplete.
They were only designed for testing that software compiled for the Intel processors would run successfully without any endian or data-type related errors, and nothing else. They were NOT intended to show off the finally released platform.
Apple are now recalling these machines from developers, and replacing them with proper machines.
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.
"Sometimes, I think Trent just needs a cup of hot chocolate and a blankie." -Tori Amos on Nine Inch Nails
Asked Microsoft spokepeople at the show....they verified that they've tried Virtual PC 7.0 on the Intel Macs, and all it does is crash so far.
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
Microsoft should make a version for Mac hardware just to sell more copies of Windows. Is there going to be enough Mac hardware out there to make it worth it?
Have you ever considered the possibility that Virtual PC runs Windows VMs slowly because the CPU is being emulated? That will no longer be the case with Intel-based Macs.
Gamingmuseum.com: Give your 3D accelerator a rest.
The mere existance of a device like a KVM just indicates the degree to which the wIntel guys just don't get it.
the preceding comment is my own and in no way reflects the opinion of the Joint Chiefs of Staff
I'd much rather have a laptop running OSX than running Windows and I can only run OSX on Apple hardware. Besides, Apple does make some very nice hardware.
The issue with dual booting is that I have some software that simply does not exist for OSX and likely never will. The software is rather performance intensive and so virtualization is not a viable solution. Thus the need to dual boot. Eventually I hope to move completely away from using Windows at all, but for now, sometimes I have to use it.
This sig has been temporarily disconnected or is no longer in service
More important to me are the lack of a full-size 5-pin DIN keyboard port, a DB-9 serial port, and 5 1/4" floppy drive.
The fact that I can't use my 23 year old floppies and keyboard really bothers me.
...Dev Studio and its tangents. My day job is developing windows software, and if I can run Dev Studio at full speed on the machine, I'll do it, cause that program is slow enough on my P4, and almost unusable on VirtualPC for my current Mac. Of course, as soon as I could, I'd switch back to OSX.
Apple is still a hardware company, and if I can use the MacBook all the time instead of this POS Dell I've got, then I'm still happy regardless of what OS is on the screen.
MacOS on PC's - that is going to be a tectonic event. Apple may, enthusiastically or reluctantly - go in that direction as the hardware difference between the two platforms starts to narrow. Imagine Apple salivating at even 10% of Microsoft's revenues vs. 4% of personal computer market. Expect before 2010. Once the gush of profits from iPod starts waning as it gets commoditized, Apple will be compelled to reinvent itself as a software company.
I also emailed Transgaming about Cedega, but so far they still have nothing useful to say.
Will OS X for Intel Mac's run on a generic PC well enough that it's accessible to a fair number of people. That will cause developers to target OS X more, and make it viable. Otherwise people are going to have some pretty overpriced Windows Mac's.
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.
The issue is dumbasses writing games in direct3d instead of opengl. You don't have to rewrite your game to take advantage of PPC, that's why we have compilers. Its already easy to make your game run on windows, mac and linux, you just have to choose to do it. Most companies don't because the extra support costs. None of this changes just because macs have different CPUs.
I don't comfortably have the room for two computers, and wouldn't enjoy the noise or power bills of two of them running at the same time. Nor would I enjoy having to maintain a network to access my files from both machines.
And I'm not even in the majority of computer users who use portables.
Slightly off-topic, but does the new firmware support target disk mode?
Different issue. The "Microsoft tax" involved Microsoft using its market power to force the OEM's to pay a license fee for any machine they sold, regardless of whether there was an operating system installed on that machine. Supposedly, many years ago, Apple approached Dell about producing Apple clones. Dell told Apple that they would have to provide the Mac OS for free since Dell had to pay Microsoft's fee.
Why should you pay for something you will not use? Good question. I don't really want all those channels I get with my cable subscription, but the cable company won't let me pay a la carte. When I bought a new car, I had to buy a whole package of options rather than just the options I wanted. And, damn it, when I buy a package of jelly beans, they won't let me return just the black ones.
It's the market. If you don't want the company offers you, don't buy it.
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.
I placed a Windows 95 CD in viewing distance of my linux machines and they never gave me troubles since. MS, ensuring your hardware behaves for two decades and counting.
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You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
It's referred to as a "tax", because often MS pressures the hardware vendor to enter a deal where they pay MS per machine, not per OS shipped. It's an anti-competitive practice, because it precludes other OS vendors from selling below the price for Windows. It wouldn't be a problem if a hardware vendor just wanted to ship each machine with Windows for some reason.
You, sir, have a rapist wit.
And how is that behaviour different from Windows running non-emulated?
--- We are not in the 8th dimension. We are over New Jersey.
Microsoft doesn't care about the move over to Vista- when it starts selling it, it'll buy it. Why not just have XP over now, so that people buy it... and then people buy it again when Vista comes out? Make twice the money, half the time... (and it sounds like the Apple approach to OS... make a new one every year and have everyone shell out $100 for it)
For its part, Microsoft encouraged Apple to build hardware compatible with Windows.
That's really really funny. Ever heard someone say "you only get what you deserve"? Boys and girls of M$, pack your stuff...Steve Jobs got a brand new bag.
The NetApp FAS900 filers, and most earlier NetApp x86 machines, use Open Firmware (the exceptions were the machines, mostly NetCache machines, using standard Intel boxes OEM'ed). Now, that was a port of the Firmworks OpenFirmware code to x86, rather than a version of Apple's independently-implemented Open Firmware implementation, but there's nothing technical that prevents Open Firmware from running on x86.
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?
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?
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because the prices are simply to damn high. Lets face it, most consumers don't know the difference between a Mac and PC but they do know the difference between a $500 DELL and a $1400 Mac! It's not rocket science. If Apple's ulterior motive for moving to Intel's architecture is to eventually compete with Wintel systems, they are gonna have to do something about there pricing. As far as I see it, the main difference between the two systems will eventually come down to the operating system and charging someone a rediculas premium for "everyday hardware" so they can run your OS is pretty ballsy. Especially when Apple has no way of hiding the prices (like they used to) behind fancy and unneccessary hardware like SCSI.
A friend of mine inside Fruitco says that if you hold down "option" during boot, you'll be able to select among the available bootable partitions, so it does look like booting EFI compatible OSes should be easy.
It's clear that Linux or one of the BSDs or some other *nix will be first to boot on one of these machines before Windows. Of course, my question at that point would be, what's the point?
XP has to have the runtime services provided by the BIOS to boot (INT 19h, INT 13h, data tables, etc.). The XP bootloader also starts in "real mode" (think 8086, 1MB memory limit, 16-bit instructions, etc.).
... no Windows XP.
... but Vista EFI might only come in the 64-bit flavor. Apple's current platform is 32-bit only. The current EFI standard (EFI 1.10) doesn't support x64. The upcoming standard (UEFI 2.0) does support x64, but won't boot an x64 OS unless the firmware is 64-bit (runtime calls to the firmware have to match the native platform firmware, and x64 can't make callbacks in 32-bit protected mode ... so 32-bit firmware only boots a 32-bit OS, and 64-bit firmware only boots a 64-bit OS)
EFI doesn't provide any of the BIOS interfaces natively. It also boots up in 32-bit protected mode, which the XP loader can't use.
Any EFI system that can also boot OS from current PCs (XP/DOS/Linux) carries an extra component called the "compatability support module" (CSM). This overlays the BIOS interface onto some EFI implementations, but this is only licensed from a few BIOS vendors.
Apple doesn't need the CSM code to boot OSX, so it's not on their platforms.
No CSM
Vista might work, because it has a native EFI install mode
So Vista would only be viable if (a) Apple makes a 64-bit MacIntelTosh, or (b) Microsoft makes a 32-bit EFI/UEFI version of Vista.
Yes, you need an EFI-capable operating system.
However, keep in mind that these systems are Vanderpool enabled. The intel core duo processor has VT (vanderpool features).
What does this mean?
Side by side independant OS virtualization utilizing Xen. Including Windows.
http://www.xensource.com/news/pr030105.html
At a minimum, you can have EFI Linux and EFI OS X running side by side.
Then you can run XP or Vista or DOS or Windows for Workgroups 3.11 in Qemu or VMware or whatever on Linux, or on Virtual PC on OS X.
WhiteWolf666 an exBush supporter. All you new-school,compassionate,save the children Republicans can rot in hell
There must be 100 people asking this question, with varying degrees of politeness, so here is the answer. It will seem extraordinary to many, but some people prefer XP. On the other hand, they like a nice shiny Apple laptop. So what they want is the OS they want, and they have a host of good and bad reasons for wanting it, on the hardware they want.
If you are a Mac user, this will seem stupid or worse to you. It seems stupid in the days of OSX, and it would have seemed stupid in the days of OS9. But it is not people like you who want to run Windows on that nice shiny hardware.
Its other people, not at all stupid, who just, believe it or not, feel differently. Not think differently, feel differently. Just like there are people who want to drink, I don't know, Coors, out of those shiny Budweiser glasses.
You all need to be more tolerant, and realise there is nothing wrong with this, and that there is no reason they should feel like you.
Or you like them, for that matter.