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Intel Macs May Boot Windows XP After All

Posted by Hemos on from the the-two-shall-meet dept.

mister_tim writes "While we'll have to wait till someone actually tries it to get absolute confirmation, news coming from Intel in Australia, reported here by Dan Warne in the Australian Personal Computer magazine, is that the new Intel-based Macs may be able to load and boot Windows XP after all. Several of the early stories after the announcement of the MacBook Pro and the Intel-based iMac assumed that Windows XP would not boot on Intel Macs, since XP doesn't support EFI (replacing BIOS in the new Macs), and Apple's statement that they wouldn't prevent the use of XP on Apple hardware didn't really give people much assurance either way. This statement from Intel implies that there is really no issue."

2 of 486 comments (clear)

  1. Just wait a couple of days! by jellomizer · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Except for hedging your bets. Why not wait at least a week, possible less. I am sure There are Thousands of people who will soon get their iMacI and try to install XP on it and post it for an attempt to have "eternal internet glory" for being the first to get a Production Macintosh to run Windows, along with other people who don't want to get outdone who will Try to have x86 Linux installed, with vmware that will run Windows, and possible OS X(But unlikely until...), then I give 1 month for them to figure out how to get OS X to run on normal PC hardware, and Vmware.

    --
    If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
  2. Not nuts -- hackers by fm6 · · Score: 5, Insightful
    I was wondering how long it would take somebody to ask this question. (Two minutes after the story was posted, big suprise.) The answer is that economics is irrelevent.

    Every time we get a story of the form "I hacked A to run on B" or "I hacked C to do E", somebody always asks whether it wouldn't be more cost effective to buy something off-the-shelf. The answer is almost always "yes". Even if the hacker is saving money on hardware, he's expending a lot of his well-paid time. But that just doesn't matter.

    A good hack is pretty much an end in itself. It might satisfy the hacker's curiousity, or improve his professional skills. Or it might add some minor functionality that the hacker's geeky priorities can't live without. But these are all secondary goals. The big goal is a sense of accomplishment, of having done something special. Asking a hacker why he doesn't just buy an off-the-shelf solution is like asking a Marathon running why he doesn't just call a cab.