So this week was full of stuff. Apple switching to Intel Pentiums, I’ve kept up my hiking (don’t expect to see any results for several months) and in general, all things still moving forward in a positive karmatic direction.
So what do I think about this Macintel thing? This has to be good for Apple. Apple will either benefit greatly, stay where they are, or die. Is the world going to end if any of these happens? No. So let’s embrace it, make the best of it, drop the pitbull anger and just make it better.
Some analysts have asked why Apple announced a year early. I think that aside from the obvious reason, to let Adobe have a ton of time to port Photoshop, Apple also benefits from listening to all of us state what we want. Do we want to be able to dual boot into Windows? Do we want dual core? All that can help them make decisions.
I’ve stated I’d like to see Apple use Intel’s EFI BIOS, just so we’re not dogged by the old crap that PCs have had for 20 years. However, Windows XP will not boot on EFI, only BIOS. Longhorn will support EFI. So who knows how, if at all, this will affect Apple’s hardware decision. Publicly, Apple has to state they don’t plan to support windows. But realistically, the reason so many PC pundits like Dvorak are salivating over this is to be able to buy dual boot machines.
Dual boot is attractive to me as I can finally have one laptop that will play PC games at full speed and let me use my Mac for everything else. Some things need to be done first before even I would use this though.
For example, booting into Windows on a separate partition protects my Mac data, or does it? If somehow a hacker gets a rootkit on my Macintel Windows partition, can’t they install software that will erase my Mac partition? Or even mount it and hack it too? The worry is the point of entry to my hardware running windows natively might introduce.
Running Windows under WINE or Virtual PC under OS X would not be an issue. The virtual machine could sandbox windows into a sparse disk image, just like Virtual PC does now. This would rock for running most Windows applications, with the exception of games.
So there is a lot of hard decisions to be made and discussed. Let Apple know what you want, what your concerns are and let’s see what the future holds.