XP on Macs: the nightmare begins

I do enjoy a good howler. Bill Gates is supposed to have predicted in the 1980s that nobody would ever need more than 640kB of RAM in a computer. Then there was Michael Fish in 1987, promising TV viewers that there was absolutely no chance a hurricane was on the way.

Speaking at the Intel Developer Forum on 9 March, Apple senior software architect Cameron Esfahani reiterated the common understanding that the new Intel-based iMac and MacBook computers could not run Microsoft Windows. It’s all to do with Macs using an Extensible Firmware Interface (EFI) rather than the legacy Bios framework for booting up, he said. A week later, a couple of Mac enthusiasts had done it. Cameron “Howler” Esfahani, come on down!

As an aside, I note that the Apple community has been buzzing about the Windows-on-Mac possibility ever since the shift to Intel chips was first announced. But when the first boxes shipped, no-one knew what to do. Then a blogger put up $100 as a dare. This quickly swelled to a prize pot of nearly $14,000, whereupon the solution was found almost overnight. The mother of all invention in the 21st century is cash, it would seem.

Jef Raskin, inventor of the Mac OS, died a year ago, but his grave is already experiencing intense centrifugal forces now that Mac users are falling over themselves to run Windows XP on their systems. They are genuinely excited about it, which confirms my suspicions that inside every Mac lover is also a closet Windows admirer.

While the wider world of computing feigns indifference, much of the talk coming out of the Mac community concerns burning issues such as “who will benefit?”, “which programs won’t run?” and “can I make any cash out of this?”

One thing is clear: Mac enthusiasts have at least temporarily lost interest in trying to run Mac OS X on Intel PCs. Even accepting the fact that Apple will sue anyone that does, there’s no point to it any more. Mac users love their Macs, not just their operating system, so they would much rather run Windows on the kit they already have. At the same time, mainstream PC users have never shown anything but an academic interest in niche operating systems.

Another thing is clear: IT departments will continue to avoid buying Macs. Officially, this is because firms don’t want to be tied to a single hardware manufacturer (being tied down to a single software vendor is no problem at all, of course). Actually, I imagine the reason is far more mundane: for the price of one Apple, you can buy three Dell PCs.

What is worrying is that organisations with mixed environments now risk a surge in IT support calls as users start fiddling with their Macs to install Windows in a dual-boot configuration. If you have Mac users in your firm, I’d start keeping a close eye on them from now on.