There’s one under-reported bit of information buried in yesterday’s Apple/Intel announcement that could be potentially huge. To quote Apple’s vice president of worldwide Mac product marketing, David Moody: “We will not sell or support Windows, but we are not doing anything in the hardware that would preclude someone from using it.”
This opens up the possibility that one could buy one of the forthcoming x86 based Macs and dual-boot the Mac OS and Windows on it. That’s huge! Bigger news than even the Intel switch, in my opinion. Even if the system couldn’t be booted directly into Windows (and this could be the case, depending on how Apple handles the BIOS/Firmware) it should be able to run Windows from within the Mac environment at near native speeds. Huge!
The fact that the hardware is able to run Windows opens up another question. Could the Mac OS be run on commodity PC hardware? Apple claims not, but the question is how will they stop people? I would assume a custom ROM chip, non-standard BIOS/Firmware, DRM on the Intel chips, any number of options. Thing is, I could see these sorts of things stopping one from booting into the Mac OS on PC hardware, but what’s to stop someone from creating an emulator inside Windows that would work around the issues and let someone run OS X from within Windows, also at near native speeds?
We’ll have to wait until next year, when the x86 based Mac hardware start coming out, to see what will happen. But I will be very surprised if some way of dual-booting Windows on Mac hardware doesn’t come out. Likewise, I’ll be equally surprised if some way of running the Mac OS on PC hardware doesn’t develop, even if just from within Windows.