SnapperTalk

January 12th, 2006

Windows on Macbook?

Posted by Ben in Gear, Macintosh, Windows

MacBook Pro Intel CoreDuo

With Apple finally releasing the first Intel-based macs - the new iMac and MacBook Pro - those hoping to at last be able to have a machine capable of natively booting both OSX & Windows should have been pretty happy. There have been ways before - OSX for Intel Developer Preview on a standar Intel machine, Windows running emulated under VirtualPC - but this was hoped to be the first “proper” way.

But if dual-booting OSX/XP is crucial for your needs, you might want to hold off on throwing down your hard cash for the new machines - at least until a few issues are clarified. Some recent discussion on messageboards suggests that because the new machines use the newer & better EFI instead of BIOS as the low-level firmware interface and Windows XP (32-bit) doesn’t support EFI at this time, natively booting Windows might not be possible yet - at least until Microsoft Vista comes out. It seems likely this issue will get quickly resolved one way or another (i.e. officially or un-officially) but if such an ability is critical it might be wise to hold off - at least until matters are clearer.

Photographers in particular should also note the switch from PCMCIA slot to new-style ExpressCard/34 slot, and the magnetic MagSafe power connector designed to avoid damage when tripping over power leads. O’Grady’s Powerpage has a brief hardware-change summary.

Further discussion of the Windows-on-Macbook subject in this MacRumors thread, this Digg thread, this BetaNews thread and others such as the MacNN forums.

Update 13/03/06: Ars Technica has posted a very extensive review of the machine here

5 Responses to ' Windows on Macbook? '

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  1. Jason Bye said:

    Also on the MacBook front, FW800 and S-Video have been dropped. Most major apps are running slower than under a G4 as they are under a PPC emulator known as Rosetta. It will be a good few months until they are updated to Universal Binaries much like the situation that those old enough to remember when Apple switched from Motorola chips to PPC. Back then it was 68k, PPC, or a FAT application which contained code for both chips.

    The MacBook is also rather expensive for what it offers over a PowerBook (and has a crap name) Personally I would hold off for a year before switching to an Intel powered Mac.

    The new processor is still 32bit. The DVD Superdrive is slower than currently shipping PowerBooks and there is a definite lack of information on battery life.

    January 13th, 2006 at 00:42 PST

  2. Ben said:

    I still think it doesn’t look bad, but hardly the dazzling machine a lot of people had been waiting for. FW800 not a big deal to me and there are FW800 Expresscards, lack of S-Video-out most annoying, name pretty bland, DVD-drive not just slower but only single-layer I believe. Shame they didn’t change the form-factor - I was hoping they’d come out with some glossy black machine styled as per the black iPod Nano.

    My impression was the Rosetta emulator was actually pretty fast, and that the overrall speed was still going to be quite good, actually faster than the last powerbook, but maybe you’ve seen specs I haven’t. That Intel CoreDuo processor is essential two processors in one right, pretty much a dual-processor?

    The Expresscard interface is meant to be seriously fast I understand, although Apple has gone for the slimmer 34mm standard, rather than the 54mm one.

    If it natively boots WinXP, I still think it’s gonna be a pretty versatile machine… but definitely one for those who don’t mind being early-adopters and/or guinea-pigs.

    January 13th, 2006 at 21:51 PST

  3. Ben said:

    Oh, and there’s some further info in APC magazine that reckons all may not be lost re: booting into XP. Guess we won’t know for sure until someone actually gets a hold of a MacBook, but as far as I can see my guess is you will be able to as it appears to be in Apple’s interest.

    January 13th, 2006 at 22:06 PST

  4. Jason Bye said:

    The problem with loosing actual ports to an express card based interface is that the user is now forced to carry dongles of various types including a firewire or USB based flash card reader as it’s too small. They have even dropped the modem. Now, in an ideal world we would all be using broadband or a 3g mobile but this is not always the case. And what happens if you need to send or receive a fax? Back to dongles and carrying yet more kit. This seems to me to have specs more in line with a consumer machine rather than something for serious road warriors. Add that to dropped screen space to accommodate a camera for chatting to your pals and it doesn’t seem to be all it’s cracked up to be. But hey I’ve had a second logic board blow on my PowerBook inside four months. Bring back the days of chucking your film on Red Star and going to the pub instead!

    January 13th, 2006 at 22:15 PST

  5. Jason Bye said:

    It appears that Rosetta does not run the following:
    - Applications built for any version of the Mac OS earlier than Mac OS X; that means Mac OS 9, Mac OS 8, Mac OS 7, and so forth
    - The Classic environment
    - Screensavers written for the PowerPC architecture
    - Code that inserts preferences in the System Preferences pane
    - Applications that require a G5 processor
    - Applications that depend on one or more PowerPC-only kernel extensions
    - Kernel extensions
    - Java applications with JNI libraries
    - Java applets in applications that Rosetta can translate; that means a web browser that Rosetta can run translated will not be able to load Java applets.

    January 14th, 2006 at 00:37 PST

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