Microsoft: "Still discussing" Virtual PC for Intel Macs

Wine is not a good solution for lots of people. The spreadsheets we use at work are EXTREMELY complex and designed for Office 2003. I have tried using OpenOffice.org 2 and gnumeric, and neither will work for what we need. Office 2003 is not usable in WINE.

Also, to connect to our network we have to log into the domain where several scripts are run to provide extra authentication to the network for security.

WINE will NEVER make my MacBook usable for work for many other reasons.

Actually, I will be extremely happy to see Virtual PC go away. On the PC it is crap software when compared to VMware. I have used both extensively. If VirtualPC goes away im sure that VMware will fill the gap. It wouldnt take much to port over since OSX is *nix and a majority of its code will most likely directly port.

Forget Virtual PC and its lack of features and crap performance. Live on VMware with its multitude of features and blazing performance.

Wouldn't it make more sense for Microsoft to license the Windows APIs to Apple and allow apple to bundle a version of OS X capable of running Windows applications?

Microsoft would still make their money and the development could be left to apple.

Who needs 'em?

MS is playing games on whether they want to update VPC? So what? Connectix did do a lot of work writing VPC in the first place...because it was a challenge to emulate i386 on G3 systems. It was quite a barrier to entry, so the market really only had room for the one player. But now that that challenge is removed, just wait 6 months to a year, and there will no longer be a monopoly on running Windows under Mac OS X--and VMWare is my pick for "most likely to do it, and do it right."

If MS thinks they've got us damn rebel mac users shaking in their boots over whether they'll port it, they've got another thing coming: Competition! (oh no! MS' worst enemy!)

DIsclaimer: I use both Windows and Mac OS X.

I think somebody will beat MS to the punch and develop something to either run windows virtually or use a user friendly version of darwine to run windows applications. MS was so slow getting VPC 7 out that I would imagine that if they don't have anything currently in development that it may be 2-3 years before we see a VPC for intel. If ever.

There is a univeral binary that allows aplications to run on all platforms and it has been around a while. It's called Java. While Java may not create the fastest desktop applications, when done right it can be very rewarding for cross platform developers.

wouldn't it just be easier and cheaper for microsoft to make windows run on the intel mac in a dual boot situation and then people could just buy windows. maybe they could even offer a windows edition for intel macs. they have a windows edition for everything else....

Along with Michael Hyatt, I have VPC running on my Mac mini with 512MB RAM. It's slow, but it does the final remaining Windows tasks that don't have Mac counterparts (some Pocket PC synching tools like ListPro and eWallet and Windows/IE only web tasks)

I would more then welcome VPC for IntelMacs. While my home/personal reliance on Windows has dropped to an all time low in the last 9 months I've had my mini, there are still a few tasks that have to be done under Windows. And I would rather have VPC than a noisy Windows box sitting around.

Wine is a very limited solution. If you only need a few popular Windows apps, it may do the job for you, but if you need to be able to be in a real Windows environment for testing or development, or if you just need to run one of the many apps wine cannot support, you need something like VPC.

Dual boot is okay, but if you need to use your Mac and Windows at the same time, you're out of luck.

VMWare (www.vmware.com) is the ideal solution. It does not emulate hardware, it virtualizes the hardware. I've used it for years on Linux, and it rocks. Each version gets better and better. I suggest that Mac users that need Windows apps as well head over to their site and send some emails or join some of the forum discussions that have mentioned OSX support.

Now that it's Intel underneath, Wine or VMware will be the best solutions. The only purpose of Virtual PC over the functionality of Wine or VMware is to emulate the hardware. With Intel Inside (ahem), Wine would be my preferred solution. I've used Wine on Linux to run any number of "required" Windows only applications (Lotus Notes, Outlook, whatever) without any Windows at all. That's the way to go here.

P.S. There is something fishy about Microsoft's consistent "we just barely found out about this" response policy.

my take: http://www.trikenit.com/2006/01/19/virtual-pc-is-emulation-not-virtualization/