The problem is that many Americans don't care about fuel economy. They complain when it costs $75 or more to fill up, but they don't draw the dots between that and the fact that they drive a 7000 pound SUV. Most of us who care know how to do the math (perhaps we care because we can do the math), and most of the rest of Americans don't even care enough to look at the sticker that's already there.
As a former BIOS option ROM developer, I have been looking forward to EFI taking over for years. I see a lot of misinformation in these threads.
UEFI is more than a graphical BIOS. In fact, the typical system interface is the UEFI shell. The shell is great for system maintenance, and I've been waiting for years for people to start writing interesting utilities for the shell. As a coder, it is a much better environment than BIOS. Instead of interacting with a bunch of interrupts, there is an actual API that you can call. The life of a BIOS option ROM programmer is really a bunch of ugly hacks to get around system dependencies. The idea of UEFI is that the UEFI environment hides all of these behind an API, so it really becomes a "hardware OS". One cool thing is that UEFI based systems have a UEFI boot loader, so there's no more need for partition based boot loaders.
The biggest adoption hurdle for years was solved by UEFI. Originally, EFI was owned by Intel, and OEMs didn't want to be beholden to Intel. Now that it is an open spec, they are happy to use it, and I hear that it is cheaper to license than a BIOS. Actually, many systems have been running UEFI for a while. We started seeing UEFI hit our labs about 5 years ago. They were running the CSM, which is a compatibility module - essentially a UEFI program that emulates an old fashioned system BIOS. However, they were still UEFI underneath. This includes several major OEMs.
One other note, if I remember correctly, Windows actually supported EFI before Linux did (but HP-UX beat both of them). EFI was always the boot solution.for Itanium, and MS has supported it for years in the IA-64 build, it just took them a while to get around to putting it back in the x86 build.
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The problem is that many Americans don't care about fuel economy. They complain when it costs $75 or more to fill up, but they don't draw the dots between that and the fact that they drive a 7000 pound SUV. Most of us who care know how to do the math (perhaps we care because we can do the math), and most of the rest of Americans don't even care enough to look at the sticker that's already there.
As a former BIOS option ROM developer, I have been looking forward to EFI taking over for years. I see a lot of misinformation in these threads. UEFI is more than a graphical BIOS. In fact, the typical system interface is the UEFI shell. The shell is great for system maintenance, and I've been waiting for years for people to start writing interesting utilities for the shell. As a coder, it is a much better environment than BIOS. Instead of interacting with a bunch of interrupts, there is an actual API that you can call. The life of a BIOS option ROM programmer is really a bunch of ugly hacks to get around system dependencies. The idea of UEFI is that the UEFI environment hides all of these behind an API, so it really becomes a "hardware OS". One cool thing is that UEFI based systems have a UEFI boot loader, so there's no more need for partition based boot loaders. The biggest adoption hurdle for years was solved by UEFI. Originally, EFI was owned by Intel, and OEMs didn't want to be beholden to Intel. Now that it is an open spec, they are happy to use it, and I hear that it is cheaper to license than a BIOS. Actually, many systems have been running UEFI for a while. We started seeing UEFI hit our labs about 5 years ago. They were running the CSM, which is a compatibility module - essentially a UEFI program that emulates an old fashioned system BIOS. However, they were still UEFI underneath. This includes several major OEMs. One other note, if I remember correctly, Windows actually supported EFI before Linux did (but HP-UX beat both of them). EFI was always the boot solution.for Itanium, and MS has supported it for years in the IA-64 build, it just took them a while to get around to putting it back in the x86 build.