No EFI Support for Vista

DietFluffy writes "Microsoft revealed today that it will not support EFI booting for Windows Vista on its launch. The news will be a shock for owners of Intel Macs who had hoped they would be able to dual-boot between Windows Vista and OS X. Intel Macs only support booting via EFI."

Comments

Dual-Booting Can Go Take A Freaking Hike

[John_Booty]

I'm not at all excited by the idea of shutting down my computer just to use another operating system.

Anybody who's used a virtualization product like VMWare knows what I'm talking about. That is where it's at.

You can run another operating system in a window without leaving your current OS. It's not an emulator in any traditional sense of the word; things run at (or a few percent shy of) native speed. The only downside is that you need enough RAM to run both operating systems simultaneously in a comfortable fashion, but 2GB of RAM is under $200 these days.

I'm going to buy an Intel Mac as soon as VMWare releases an OSX version of VMWare or an open-source implementation reaches that level of quality (there are some strong contenders). I'm willing to put down the cash to run Windows on an Intel Mac, but dual-booting isn't even part of the equation.

Re:Dual-Booting Can Go Take A Freaking Hike

[jcr]

VMWare is a very fine product, and I too look forward to seeing it on a Mac. A friend of mine solved a rather hairy Windows problem by running multiple virtual NT machines under VMWare, since he wasn't allowed to ditch NT altogether (decisions made many, many levels above his customer).

In the application in question, they had 21 NT hosts running their web apps. In production, these machines stayed up about five hours. The band-aid solution was to make one machine reboot all the others every four hours. The permanent fix was to run NT under VMWare: the NT instances still failed, but restarting one from a pristine state became a five-second operation.

For a bonus, they picked up enough performance from Linux's paging versus NT's utterly brain-dead paging, that they were able to free all but three of the 21 machines that had been using to other tasks.

The answer to a broken OS is to run it in a penalty box under a working OS.

-jcr

A shock, you say...

[mederjo]

I know it's the fashionable thing to do, but the whole article summary is a troll. I can't imagine all that many people are buying Intel Macs because there's a chance they might boot Windows, or rather any one who is going to be shocked-SHOCKED! if they can't. Not out in the real - not /. - world anyway. Some might be a bit miffed perhaps. I would hope that those who do want to dual boot Windows and OS X are savvy enough to wait to see if it's actually going to be possible before making a purchase. If not, well, sad for them but they have a pretty good OS and machine. I'm sure there'll be some sort of virtualisation environment available which will probably make for a more useful experience than dual booting anyway - much easier to share stuff between OSes when you can run both at the same time. Using Windows on my PC via RDC on one of my Macs is often more convenient than flipping between machines using my KVM.

Many of the people I'm aware of who are buying Intel Macs are people who have been hanging out for a pepped up PowerBook. There are a few who seem to be getting them because they're the "new Mac", more money than sense :-). I only know one or two first time Mac buyers who have been waiting for a spread of Intel Macs ( i.e. mini, iMac and MacBook ) to choose from. None of them seem to be particularly interested in running Windows on their new machines.

I have a 17" Intel iMac, which I got as a replacement machine from Apple for my DTK prototype Intel Mac. It's a great little machine. I have no intention at all of booting Windows on it - that's what my PC is for ;-).

BTW, does anyone know where the "shocked-SHOCKED!" thing ( not necessarily with my capitalisation ) came from? I've seen quite a few people saying/writing it, and the only place in the popular media, if you will, that I've seen it is in the movie "High Fidelity" where Joan Cusack says it when having lunch with the Laura character. Is that where it came from? It's been buggin' me :-).

Regards,

Jo Meder

Re:Leader of the pack, not

[lmlloyd]

I hate to rain on you MS-trashing party, but Microsoft already DOES support EFI. EFI is, after all, a PC technology, developed for the Itanium, not something Apple designed for their systems. The summary of the article is quite simply wrong. Vista will support EFI in the 64-bit version, for 64-bit chips, this being a technology designed for a 64-bit processor. In fact 64-bit XP and 2003 ALREADY support EFI. What will not be supported is EFI on 32-bit chips, since no one is doing that except Apple.

Re:Wrath of the Windows Users!

[Kadin2048]

And WINE's progress is a poor example. Part of the reason for its slow pace is that there hasn't really been as strong a need for it as there is today. Until Intel-based Macs appeared, there was no real compelling need for WINE - it ran on x86 boxes that could boot Windows anyway. Now we have x86 boxes that can't boot Windows, WINE's API-level Windows app support is a somewhat interesting for Mac users.

I think this is an excellent point that can't be said enough.

WINE suffers, at least right now, from a rather limited appeal. The only people I've run into who use it regularly, are pretty hardcore Linux users who are adamant about not wanting to reboot into Windows in order to use some app, or run a game. I've played around with it (well, Cedega anyway) enough to get WoW working on a Linux machine, because I bought it bare-bones and wasn't about to buy a Windows license just for one game.

But it's a limited market of people who have a regular Intel PC and won't just reboot in Windows.

There is going to be a huge untapped market for a MacWINE variant, that will run Windows applications on the new Intel Macs. I think this market is far in excess of the existing Linux-user demand, and Mac users won't hesitate to pay for a product that does this elegantly and well. In short, there's a big space right now for a company to jump in (maybe Cedega would license their codebase, if the company was scared of the GPL) and produce a commercial product for running Windows applications on Mac.

I think you could probably sell a product like that, even if it only ran a few PC-only applications (but if it ran those applications well and you clearly advertised which it would run) for upwards of $100 a seat. A lot would depend on packaging and support -- I don't think that Cedega-style forums are going to cut it for a Mac-using audience.

If there are a dozen groups possibly working on something like that right now, as you suggest, they're doing it damn quietly. I suppose we're still pretty early in the Intel transition yet, though.