TUAW poll results: XP on an iMac

Win XP or Vista or whatever M$ OS is available will never blight my Apple machines - HELL WILL FREEZE OVER FIRST.

I can't see Apple legal going after anyone here. Amazingly, this will probably sell more Macs to pc people. I just look forward to hopefully running XP native in the OS X environment.

Forget legal ramifications, is it me, or is this the lamest post on the best mac blog, like ever?

^^^^

Oops, let a little edit screw me up. Don't know what I was going for. And Off topic, when did TUAW start advertising spyware like the "Joke Toolbar"? If I'd clicked that from my Win partition, I would have gotten spyware, um, I mean, a HILARIOUS JOKE IN MY TOOLBAR!!!!1!!11!

Well, I'm dual booting on my shiny new MacBook Pro now, and...

...meh.

It's awesome to have a PC that can run platform-dependent (barring hardware (sans accelerated video, natch), but anyone running Windows for a while will remember why we use a Mac in the first place. It's not "icky", just kludgy and unwieldy, and even in a freshly-installed-on-bare-metal state, serves constant reminders about how great the Mac OS is. Spotlight? Expos鿠 Dashboard? Unified interface?

If anything, this is the single most eye-opening experience about what makes the Mac OS superior to Windows or even Linux. Security, viruses, spyware aside, Windows and Linux are like trying to build a car out of random pieces in a wreckyard. Here's a piece, there's a door, there's a taillight, they may be nice doors, taillights, etc., but I'll be damned if you can make it a great car with all the parts working together. Then the Apple drives by, elegant, seamlessly built, and you realize what the difference is when someone makes "the whole widget".

Full disclosure: Fmr. Apple (retail) employee, but I was a pretty jaded Mac user until this experience.

Still glad for the dual boot, thanks Blanka and Narf, but I'll spend as little time on my other partition as possible.

Well, seems like a legal opinion is needed. Apple Computer may indeed decide to protect its intellectual property by objecting to any tampering with OS X necessary under the current dual booting kludge. Would that violate Steve 'Flower Child' Jobs' claim that Apple does not oppose running Windows on the Mac? Not necessarily. If I were on Apple's legal team my brief would argue that though Apple would not interfere with Windows running on its own, it reserves the right to protect tampering with OS X, which could degrade the product and reduce its value. I'm sure Apple's lawyers can come up with an argument along those lines that is pretty convincing.

I think the naive do not realize the importance Apple attaches to having its software and hardware be a unitary, proprietary system. I think Apple values that over the relatively few new users it would attract by Windows dual booting.

So, we wait and see.

Apple or MS won't be suing anyone, especially if this means Apple sells more hardware (their primary source of revenue) and MS sells more software licenses (their primary source of revenue).

And a lot of folks are going to be disappointed when they find that they can't play Counterstrike or many of these other Windows-only games on their Mac; Windows can't even utilize the 3D hardware acceleration on these graphics cards because they use Mac-specific firmware that Windows can't recognize (and who knows what other aspects of the Mac hardware will be inaccessible to Windows). I don't know if there will be a practical way to over come this (it doesn't seem likely), but it is possible with vmware (I don't mean to sound like a vmware shill, but it still sounds like the best option in my opinion). Besides, I'm not going to install Windows on my Mac just to play games... *sheesh* I'll just build my own pc for cheap for that stuff. Or, better yet... by a game console.

I think it will play out like this - as long you need some real skills to install and run OSX & XP side by side, Apple will ignore it - since all it will do is sell machines to the best audience - tech-heads who will run & buy anything if you tell them it's hard to do something :-)

Of course, MS will keep an eye on things to make sure legit copies of Vista/XP are being installed but MS is also more than happy to sell you a full retail price OS package versus an OEM version since they make less than way. MS makes their money that way - they don't really care what hardware you buy to run it on. Either way, a % of people will buy Office so money is money whether it's a Mac or PC version.

Of course, Apple cares what hardware you buy - that's why OSX on a PC will never happen (well, the same day Steve Jobs hugs Mike Eisner & John Sculley in public). Even if the vast majority are non-pirated versions and even if Apple sells a special bundle of ilife/OS together for PC's - every one sold that way means one less MAC customer and less incentive for developers going forward plus the HIDDEN costs of Tech support for Mac/ilife on PC's ... remember the vast majority of Pc buyers are bottom grazers so they'll be a lot of people calling and complaining & wondering why all their icons are stuck at the bottom and why can't they choose lime nuclear green and fluorescent pink as system colors ...

While letting people install Xp on Macs is all great for Apple - it also appeals to PC fence sitters as if - hey, if this Mac OS thing doesn't work out, I can switch to the PC OS (while we smirk) ... and if they screw it, Apple's tech support will simply explain how to reinstall OSX (after all, the other Oses are unsupported).

It's all good except for people who sell crappy PC's (you know who they are :-)

In Reply to Ton E:

WINE isn't 100%, and still requires bits of Windows (DLLs and such), sometimes it's spot on, sometimes things fail outright, I'd much rather have either a better system of cross-OS support or actually have Windows instead of trying to coerce my programs into running (that would hardly fit with Apple's 'simplicity' image, as well.)

Also, I'd prefer to not have the added layer that VirtualPC is, and instead go right for the full-blown OS. As it is VirtualPC and VMWare on Windows-based systems don't reach full capacity, and even VMWare with 3d acceleration support still underpreforms, a 9500 Pro, when I tested it, ran about where the old Geforce2/3 ran at best, and only certain 3d functions were possible.

Er, Dave, with at least 4,500 people taking the time to read the TUAW blog and vote in the poll, you really should take the time to get better informed. As all the comments above imply, there is no copyright violation of Apple's OS here.

If anything at all, it's Microsoft legal who would act, IF it was found the patches included some of their own software. But I don't think they do: the patches amount to an original EFI compatibility module written to get the Windows bootstrap installer running, and the rest mostly param modifications to .SIF and .INF files. I don't know what the copyright status on NTDETECT.COM is.

What WOULD be interesting is a blog post giving us the lowdown on the mood in Cupertino right now:

1) Elation that there is extra incentive for a switcher to buy Mac hardware knowing that the safety blanket of Windows software is there,
or,
2) despondency that their gleaming OS is being sidestepped to turn a Mac into a dull little PC, performing dull little PC tasks...?