On Friday, Paul Thurrott quoted Australian Personal Computer’s Dan Warne, “Microsoft revealed today that it will not support EFI booting for Windows Vista on its launch. The news will be a shock for owners of Intel Macs who had hoped they would be able to dual-boot between Windows Vista and OS X. Intel Macs only support booting via EFI.”
In case you missed that news, we covered it last Thursday here: Microsoft Windows Vista will not support EFI booting (Intel-based Macs only support booting via EFI).
Thurrott’s reaction: Yikes. So. Does anyone want to buy a near-new Intel iMac? 🙁
Daring Fireball’s John Gruber beat us to the punch on this one with the concise headline “Dipshit of the Week: Paul Thurrott” and the two-line note, “Ends up, surprise surprise, that Windows Vista probably won’t boot the Intel-based Macs. Paul Thurrott now apparently wants to sell his new iMac — which, of course, Apple has explicitly stated would never support Windows.”
More wit and witticisms can usually be found over at Daring Fireball: http://daringfireball.net/
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Related MacDailyNews article:
Microsoft Windows Vista will not support EFI booting (Intel-based Macs only support booting via EFI) – March 09, 2006
Not even Thurrott is stupid enough to buy an iMac only as a well-designed Winbox. Don’t give him the time of day. He’s just trolling for hits as usual.
I have been sucked in a little by Thurrott lately. Never again. The idiot now seems to be saying that the only reason he bought the iMac was to run Doze.
“dipshit of the week” ? just one week?
What an id10t.
Apple never said that it would dual boot. What an idiot.
im assuming he hasnt used it yet, if he had he would probably be keeping it
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Bet the house he keeps the iMac and uses it.
He’ll only be pretending to use a WinBox.
MDN – where’s the note regarding Gruber’s misstatement?
In fact, Apple has explicitly stated that they would do nothing to prevent Windows from running on Intel Macs.
Thurott’s right — owning an Intel Mac right now is a liability unless you traded up from a 500MHz G4. Rosetta is disappointing (apps are running slower than on the previous generation Macs), Universal binaries are failing to materialize on the promised schedule (probably not Apple’s fault, but definitely their problem), the price points are too high, and their “first model in the line” slips are starting to show (problems w/ the graphics, trouble w/ some wireless connectivity, etc.)
The real exciting promise of owning Intel-based Mac hardware right now was dual-booting it. That still may happen, of course, but the goal line has just been officially moved another hundred yards away. I’ll stick with my Mirror Door system, thankyouverymuch. Good luck unloading that ol’ boat anchor, Paul.
Well Folks,
the GOOD NEWS for that are:
1) If wintel people want to use/try out Mactel, they have to buy the apple hardware.
2)If both systems can not boot vice versa, that we wont face the VISTA (ViruseS, InfectionS, SpywareS, TrojanS, AdS) problems
and the BAD NEWS is:
1) Deng, there are tons of good softwares/games/hardwares (Let’s face the truth, folks) we can’t run on our beloved Mac.
What say you guys?
Seeing as a small company wrote Virtual PC (and another company developed SoftPC) that emulated a full PC (Pentium & all), is it that unreasonable to expect another company would be able to figure out a way to bridge the bios —> EFI thing? Maybe not by this Thursday, but sometime soon?
Who want’s to dual-boot? Gimme VirtualPC !!! Next we’ll hear that MS is cancelling the Mac version of VPC due to “lack of interest” or “no viable market”.
Who is this guy at Daring Fireball? Is he deaf? Blind? Can he not read?
We have said over and over again, “WE WILL DO NOTHING TO PREVENT WINDOWS RUNNING ON INTEL MACS!”
What part of nothing does he (and Thurrott) not understand? You think no official support for EFI booting will stop people from doing it?
And just because Microsoft makes an obvious anti-Mac move at this late hour – Or is it they’re too incompetent to make it work in a reasonable amount of time? – should be no surprise to anyone.
But to be fair, I don’t think Thurrott started out hoping this would happen. I think he’s just too sucked into the Microsoft Kool Aide driking crowd to escape the RDF from Ballmer and Bill.
Bill –
Odds are they will. But by then, the intel Mac hardware will be more mature with fewer bugs, more features, and more bang-for-buck. When that happens (or any of a handful of other problems are resolved), these things’ value will justify their cost. At the moment, they don’t. So he’s trying to capitalize on the hype to take as small a loss as possible on it.
“And just because Microsoft makes an obvious anti-Mac move at this late hour – Or is it they’re too incompetent to make it work in a reasonable amount of time? – should be no surprise to anyone.”
I’ll vote for incompetence – or at least, implementing EFI and BIOS booting into Vista without breaking something was proving too hard for them, so they dropped it since the legacy BIOS population is so much larger.
Besides, is this an Anti-Apple move, or an Anti-INTEL move?
Hey Thurrott! Keep this link bookmarked:
http://darwine.opendarwin.org//
Seems like they’re close to it now so anyone can run any Windows-programme they want without running Windows at all and isn’t that the best of all imaginable worlds, I don’t know what is!
I mean, who in their right mind love Windows in itself?
I always wonder why people express opinions on subjects they do not understand.
The fact that Vista won’t boot on an Intel Mac does not mean that it won’t run on an Intel Mac. It just means that you will have to boot MacOS X as usual and then run a product like VMWare to run Windows at almost native speed.
Do I care? No, this is exactly what I want. I want to always boot into Mac OS X and maybe sometimes run a program or two that doesn’t run on the Mac. If I had wanted to boot into Windows I would have bought a Dull.
I recently bought an intel iMac and am completely happy with it. Value for money is a perception thing and I think there is much added value in not having to deal with windoze and all its attendant problems. If I wanted to run Windoze (God forbid) I would have bought a Winbox.
Thurrott is an idiot.
Microsoft don’t want to enable EFI in Windows for the simple reason that once ‘diehard’ Windoze users experience the superiority of OSX on their dual OS Mac then Windows-related software sales will plummit in favour of Mac-related software sales.
The killer move will come with OSX 10.5 when Windows applications can natively run on Intel-based Macs without the ‘Windows OS’ actually being present.
“The killer move will come with OSX 10.5 when Windows applications can natively run on Intel-based Macs without the ‘Windows OS’ actually being present.”
Agree, with one correction. ‘Windows XP/2000 application’. It should not run applications that require Vista.
EFI must be a problem for MS. Once EFI become norm, MS may need to start working on multiple platform OS again (intel X86, Itanium). They did not do so well developing a multi-platform OS last time, Windows for X86, Alpha, PPC. Apple already has multi-platform OS, PPC+X86. They probably have one running on Itanium too. It will be interesting, if Apple introduces Xserve with dual Itanium and Universal Application supporting three platforms?
What?! FISTA’s not going to boot on Intel Macs?! Oh my goodness, holy feakin crap – oh man – my whole vision for my new Mac has been completely and totally ruined!
Y a a a wwwwwnnnnnn…
I’ll give him 1/2 what he paid for it–provided it has NO microsh-t on it.
2 years ago Microsoftopoly announced at WINHEC (Windoze Hardware Engineering Conference) that the minimum specs to run Vista would be a dual core CPU, EFI, etc. Since then they have removed feature after feature and scaled back their plans for VISTA that is nothing more than a Service Pack for XP with a changed GUI.
Micro$oftopoly was so afraid that VISTA would bomb by requiring a hardware upgrade cycle that they have dumped a anywhere between half and 2/3rds of what was supposed to be the primary reason for the OS overhaul in the first place.
Talk about putting lipstick on a pig.
Wish I caught that one.
Do you know how hard it is to implement EFI? Damn you guys, we should reprogram the DOS kernel, we bought and have been using ever since.
You know, Longhorn should have shipped 3 years ago. Now it will ship this year and it will be great! We will have new eh.. and eh… Whatever, Vista ROCK! Whieee, I LOVE THIS COMPANY…
PC Apologist, there’s a difference between “not preventing” users installing Windows and “supporting” it.
Oh, by the way, people buy Macs to run Mac OS X, not Windows.