of today’s announcements from Apple at the WWDC is buried in most stories. In the News.com story linked above it doesn’t come out until the end of the second page. To wit, Phil Schiller has said that there won’t be anything done to prevent someone from running Windows on an Intel-Apple box. At the same time, Apple’s still a hardware company, so you can be sure that Tiger/Leopard will only work on Apple boxes. What that means, potentially, is that if you buy an Apple machine you can run whatever you want - Linux, OS X, or Windows - whereas if you buy a random-PC-manufacturer’s box you’d be restricted to Windows and/or Linux. Sounds like a pretty good strategy to me.
The most interesting part
June 6th, 2005 | Apple • Macintosh • Windows
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That’s only natural. They always touted the availability of VirtualPC back in the day as the ‘best of both worlds’ scenario, except now, presumably, future versions of VPC won’t need to translate instruction calls. Intel also has some VMWare-style tools for enabling multiple, simultaneous operating systems to run on a single machine. Theoretically on a HT or dual-core processor you could allocate 50% of the processing power to one OS or the other, and a crash in one wouldn’t affect the other.
The point is that without requiring VPC but rather offering a straight boot into Windows will protect any IT VPs who may want to source OS X machines and open up their organization but still want to be able to fall back to Windows if it becomes necessary later.
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