Filed under: Macworld, Desktops, iMac
Windows on an iMac?
When I
wasn't grilling Apple folks
about .Mac integration I was talking to them about the possibility of running Windows on some of this newly release
hardware. To a person the response I got was, 'Windows can't be installed.' When I pressed for a reason, whether it be
hardware or something else, no one knew.I know that Apple didn't release this cool gear so that people could install Windows but it seems to me it should be possible. How many days do think it will be until we see an iMac running Windows?
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Reader Comments (Page 1 of 2)
Paul said 7:10PM on 1-10-2006
worst idea ever.....
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Henry said 7:14PM on 1-10-2006
I think a better question is how soon do you think Mac users will be clearing their drives and performing a cleansing ritual after installing and booting from Windows, and knowing their Mac is crying on the inside? :D But I think it will be the first day people have iMacs, a little while for it to become linked to on the web, another week for the server to function after a continual slashdotting. Heh, I just told the OS X dictionary to learn "slashdotting" does it know googling? Wow. It does.
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Peter C said 7:20PM on 1-10-2006
That doesn't seem to jive with what AP reported Phil Schiller, Apple's senior vp of worldwide product marketing, as saying:
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.
http://biz.yahoo.com/ap/060110/apple_microsoft.html?.v=2
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Will Design for Food said 7:27PM on 1-10-2006
I'm thinking on the first or second day that these things start shipping someone will crack it open and install windows just to say they did it. I think the question is how long do you think it'll be before windows users start using ported copies of OS X on their machines (I know they do it now, but I think it may become a little more mainstream now)?
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Chris Marks said 7:44PM on 1-10-2006
I think it's just a matter of Windows having proper drivers for the hardware. My guess is that there are some generic drivers that will allow Windows to run poorly, but people will develop better drivers to properly utilize the hardware. The only thing that concerns me is the graphics card. It probably has firmware that only OS X could recognize. We'll know soon enough...
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Jim Gaynor said 7:46PM on 1-10-2006
It's all going to be a matter of how much custom hardware is in the iMac (and MacBook, and whatever else comes down the pipeline), and whether or some someone is able to put together Windows drivers for it.
Certainly, it doesn't have a BIOS that set up for tradional x86 booting.
Remember the first times that people got versions of Linux running on a PowerMac G5? The fans - all of them - ran full tilt and non-stop, because there wasn't anything in the OS to control the cooling system or power management.
It'll be the same with Windows. Apple may be using Intel CPUs and chipsets, but you can be certain that the iMac and MacBook also have Apple-designed chipsets for various purposes. Without drivers, Windows won't be able to handle them.
Now, as an aside, I seem to recall hearing that Intel was doing the mobo design work for the Power Mac G5 replacement. That might actually make that machine an easier candidate for Windows booting.
What I want to know is, with Intel MacOS X actually out in the legal wild now, how long until we see a 10.4.4 that boots on more generic Intel-based hardware?
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Ed said 7:57PM on 1-10-2006
Even better question is when is Microsoft going to make Virtual PC Intel compatible? It'd run nearly as fast as normal, since it's just a virtual machine running native code, much like VMWare on the PC, or Virtual PC for Windows. That is what I really want on my MacBook Pro... Dual boot is too cumbersome.
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James Webster said 8:03PM on 1-10-2006
Personally, I am more interested to know how quickly there will be some sort of virtualisation solution for running a virtual Windows XP machine within Intel Mac OS X, at much faster speeds than current PowerPC solutions. I can't imagine Microsoft will be in a hurry to port Virtual PC to Intel MacOS X, so we might have to look to VMware to port VMware Player to this platform. Alternatively maybe Parallels or QEmu will come to the party?
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J said 8:12PM on 1-10-2006
I don't think that MacOS X will become any more 'mainstream' on non-Apple hardware than it is now. Sure - there will always be someone out there cracking the system updates to run on non-Apple hardware, but for most users, having to re-install (and re-download through bittorrent) a new OS for each update is the biggest pain in the world.
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J said 8:15PM on 1-10-2006
Forget dual boot and Virtual PC.
http://darwine.opendarwin.org/
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glad said 8:17PM on 1-10-2006
For heavens sake, stop! What is wrong with you people, if you are laying down the bucks for an imac, macpro, why would you want to run windoze on it. Some of you need counselling and quick. You buy a mac you run OSX on it simple as that for me. If I want to run windoze, (which I do), I have a dull beige box for that (which I use to run two programs). For all other things it's any of my three macs.
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Jacques Lema said 8:40PM on 1-10-2006
Having used a lot wine on linux I can tell you wine is not that ready for prime time. it's nice for certain apps but on the whole it's still rather unstable except for a select range of apps. And I don't even think of games.
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will said 8:46PM on 1-10-2006
I expect the accurate statement is that "windows won't (currently) install" on the machines, rather than "windows *can't*, or, *won't ever* install". I think it's probably a driver issue and/or hardware recognition issue.
I think that, while Phil Schiller's statement means that Apple isn't making an effort to prevent Windows being installed on the machines, that doesn't necessarily imply that it'll *just simply* install, by default, without some work, and/or changes being made to Windows itself to recognize and/or work with the hardware.
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Paul said 9:38PM on 1-10-2006
I don't think it's likely, as it's probably a safe bet that the new Intel Macs use EFI (which Intel happens to strongly back) rather than BIOS, rendering it unable for XP to run on it. Vista, perhaps, but not XP.
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cclauset said 10:07PM on 1-10-2006
First off, you have to create your partition map by hand (man pdisk) since no GUI-based disk utility can partition a single physical drive with both HFS and FAT32 (since Windows doesn't do HFS and Mac OS X treats NTFS as read-only and can't install on FAT32). The other issue is that the current iMac and MacBook Pro hardware uses Extensible Firmware Interface (EFI) and Windows XP (32-bit) doesn't do EFI (yet).
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Geoff said 10:11PM on 1-10-2006
Actually, I play World of Warcraft with wine on Ubuntu Linux all the time, and it works great for the most part. Wine is indeed not ready for prime time, but the important thing to remember is that after more than a decade, it's *almost* ready for prime time. It's become something to watch pretty closely.
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Wheels said 12:16AM on 1-11-2006
God, first they whine about the MacBook Pro weighing all of 5 pounds - GASP! - now they want Windows to be able to run on a iMac.
STOP THE MADNESS!
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Don Wilson said 12:37AM on 1-11-2006
It's been confirmed that the MacBook Pro and i(ntel)Mac has the EFI boot loader, which will be able to emulate a bios for Windows.
See: http://developer.apple.com/documentation/MacOSX/Conceptual/universal_binary/universal_binary_diffs/chapter_3_section_10.html#//apple_ref/doc/uid/TP40002217-CH240-BAJGDABG
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Michael said 3:09AM on 1-11-2006
Simply put, why would you want to!!!
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FritzLaurel said 4:22AM on 1-11-2006
I would love to be able to have a Windows virtual machine run natively on the same machine as my OS X apps. I develop websites under Windows servers for a living and I would much rather do my development on the OS X side. But, it's a pain maintaining a development server on a separate PC just for that purpose. If I could combine the two, awesome.
I think some bozo will get some flavor of Windows to boot on the new machines, and I'd be surprised if MS didn't jump at the chance to sell more Windows, myself. But, the way to do it, IMHO, is via some virtual mechanism.
I wouldn't, though, ever want to turn my Mac into a Wintel box, ever. OS X first and foremost. Windows, native and virtual, only when needed (which is a fairly often for me). Because of that, these new machines have the capability to greatly increase my productivity. And 5 lbs is much less than lugging two laptops around.
Bravo, Apple ... again!
FL
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