- last post: 01.01.0001 12:00 AM PDT
Hence the use of the word natively. I didn't mean to imply that the processor was incompatible with windows, I merely suggested that you wouldn't see it very often.
Can these Intel-based Macs run Windows?
Ask people from Apple this question, and they’ll do one of two things: shrug, or plug their ears and pretend they can’t hear you. Basically, Apple’s official policy is that if someone wants to figure out how to run Windows on a Mac, they can go ahead and do it, but Apple doesn’t want to know about it.
One interesting quirk of these new Intel-based Macs is that, unlike the developer test systems released last summer, these systems use Intel’s Extensible Firmware Interface (EFI) instead of the tried-and-true BIOS that classic PCs use. Windows XP doesn’t actually support EFI, although the forthcoming Windows Vista will.
So the question is, how will people get Windows to run on the Mac? We’re sure someone much smarter than us will figure it out. Whether you’ll be able to re-boot into Windows or run it in some sort of compatibility box—hello, Virtual PC!—remains to be seen.
Taken from macworld
To clarify - Virtual PC is a mac-based Windows emulator and it suffers the same fate of every emulator - it is immensely slower than the real thing. While it is anticipated that such programs would become much more efficient in Intel-based macs, an emulator is not to be confused with a native OS.
Another reference:
PCWorld
The last article talks about Linux as well, which is actually already running natively on PowerPC Macs. That and the fact that Linux is open source would give Linux a push. Although Windows Vista will use EFI, Microsoft has not announced plan to develop a native OS for Intel-based macs (yet...), however, it has said that if Mac wants to support windows, it's more than welcome to (some compromise, eh?). Mac hasn't made any official response to that. And it doesn't look like they're planning to.
So, what this means is that Linux will bend to accomodate Intel-based Macs, but Microsoft bows to no one.
Does that mean that you won't see windows on a Mac? If you look hard enough, but I don't personally know any programmers that would spend the time trying to make windows work on a mac when (s)he could be doing the same with Linux. That doesn't mean they don't exist (maybe I should get out more - ya know - go to more porgramming conventions...)
I could be wrong. It happens every once-in-a-blue-moon-on-a-leap-day.