Macwintel

Greetings from Macwintel.com!

January 17, 2006 on 5:31 am | In Uncategorized |

Hey all, we registered this domain in the anticipation of the burgeoning community of people who would like to run windows on their shiny new intel macs…

I’m Mike, a longtime windows guy who has owned a couple of g4 powerbooks and a dual g5, and currently own a mac mini (my first computer was a mac plus). I’ve always appreciated apple’s aesthetics (if not their QA). Currently, i prefer to use windows machines, and keep a mac mini around to compile and test mac stuff on. My notebook of choice has been an IBM thinkpad, which I’ve always viewed as rock solid and reliable, until last week, one day after “Teh Steve’s” announcement about the new Macbook, my steady reliable thinkpad just died. I considered this an omen. It came at a rather unfortunate time, however, as I was onsite in Torino setting up a display project for the olympics. I couldn’t get a replacement and had to borrow someone else’s Dell (thanks, Simon). Ironically, thinkpad is the official notebook of the Olympics.

Strangely enough, my thinkpad problem was quite similar to Ellen Feiss’s. I was coding up this mission critical project when my screen started blinking and when i rebooted it went bleep bleep bleep (actually this was the beep code for “everything from my memory to my display and my motherboard have totally died.”) The only difference between me and Ellen is that I hadn’t smoked copious amounts of ganja before hand.

And Ellen you’re totally cute. Call me. We’ll make out.

History:

There were quite a few rumors floating around when apple released OSX that they also had managed to compile an X86 version. The project was supposedly codenamed “Marklar” In June 2005, Steve Jobs at the Apple developer conference let us know that the rumors were true, and that he would convert the whole mac line to x86 by the end of 2006.

Apple then released some transition kits to developers to test out their software moving to x86. Some crafty developers managed to install windows on it, as well as cracked the OSX implementation that locked it to Apple hardware and installed it on vanilla x86 boxes. This corresponds to Apple senior vice president Phil Schiller’s statement: “That’s fine with us. We don’t mind,” Schiller said. “If there are people who love our hardware but are forced to put up with a Windows world, then that’s OK.” This is marketing tough talk to make it seem like their acceptance of windows dominance was a matter of Apple’s magnanimity.

Now last week Apple reported being ahead of schedule with the transition and released the intel core duo imac and the intel core duo macbook. Much drooling occured.

So to the question: Can we install windows on these like on the dev boxes? So far, it seems not:

Just for kicks, I tried to boot from a Windows XP installer CD. No dice. I then tried booting from a Vista installer DVD (Build 5270). Again, no dice. When holding down the Option key, the only icon that appeared was for the iMac’s internal hard drive. Holding down the D key to try to force booting off of the optical drive failed as well. With the Vista DVD, the optical drive churned a bit and the iMac hesitated as though it were contemplating whether it wanted to boot the foreign OS. Soon afterwards, the familiar gray Apple logo appeared on screen and Mac OS X finished booting.

So where does this leave us? So far we are anxiously waiting to get our hands on these machines, to figure out how to book windows on the new extensible firmware.