Scott Hanselman

Lots of folks out there still trying to get public builds of Vista running on the new Macs. I've said before it's likely not going to happen because of the new BIOs or lack of in the new Intels/Macs. They use EFI and there's no EFI support in the Vista Betas as of yet. Here's some more inside scoop from super-secret-have-to-kill-you-sources. However, it will likely make no difference and folks will still try to ice skate uphill.

You are right it won't happen anytime soon, in the wild. Current builds of Vista Support EFI but its presently disabled and core EFI files are not present in the Vista builds. EFI is yet to be turned on in builds available to the Vista beta test community, until that happens people are just tilting at windmills. However useful work has and is being done to understand what they have done so far, spurred in no small part by a now considerable amount of money folks are offering as bounty. 

Apple has publicly said they will NOT create barriers to prevent the Apple hardware from running O/Ses other than OSX. They won't support it but they won't prevent it either. The word from Microsoft is less clear. There are likely two camps at Microsoft. Camp one probably says "hell no, we don’t want to support Apple at all other than office". Camp two retorts with "any software we can sell to run on Apple hardware is good". Conventional wisdom says that Microsoft is hard at work on Virtual PC for Intel Macs. 

For my part I want to see this Cross O/S Cross platform effort succeed. The easy ability to run both O/Ses on WinTel or MacTel will be a huge bonus. When this is do-able I'm going to buy a Dual Core Laptop and I'm going to do it. I want Intel for Development and DJing purposes and I want Mac for Music Production, Logic, Protools, Garageband + others.  

Now for the good word. Rumor is that Microsoft already have Vista running on iMacs on campus. Likewise it's rumored Intel has a Vista build running on Mac hardware. So it not only feasible for some users, there is a reason other than just the pure challenge for a good many. [super-secret-have-to-kill-you-source]

Secret or not, all this means that the consumer gets more choice, and that's always a good thing, so I ain't mad at 'cha.

About Scott

Scott Hanselman is a former professor, former Chief Architect in finance, now speaker, consultant, father, diabetic, and Microsoft employee. He is a failed stand-up comic, a cornrower, and a book author.

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