The Brad Hole

Most Mac users with an internet connection and some spare time are no doubt aware that Apple announced that they are now shipping Macs with intel chips as of today, a full 6 months earlier than the drop-dead date they gave last year for shipping their first unit. This is a pretty amazing thing considering the huge architectural shift here, and for that Apple deserves a huge round of applause.

My current laptop is a 500 MHz iBook with a G3 in it, bought in 2001. It's well past its useful lifetime, so the new, yet awkwardly-named, PowerBook replacement, the MacBook Pro will no doubt replace it in the near future. :)

When Apple announced the move to intel at WWDC last June, they offered "Developer Transition Kits" that you could lease for $999, with the stipulation that you had to return them to Apple at the end of the lease - December 2006. This was done to get some form of intel Mac in developers hands before they hit the streets, which was assumed - incorrectly it turns out - to be around June 2006. It also turns out that the DTK boxes are at a dead-end. They won't run the announced 10.4.4 update. They also don't represent the real intel Macs in a number of key areas - the DTK boxes use a BIOS, the new intel Macs use a next-generation BIOS replacement called EFI (which also inadvertently prevents Windows from booting, if the rumors are true). The DTKs also used integrated intel video chips, which were very poor at 3D. The shipping Macs use ATI X1600 chips, which are quite a step up.

So what's a developer with a DTK box to do, now that it's effectively a dead-end solution? Apparently Apple has decided that Christmas has come a little late, so they're letting developers trade their DTK boxes for a newly-shipping iMac. And you get to keep the intel iMac - keepsies, no take backs. Of course, we still have to box up the DTK and send it back when the iMac replacement arrives, but what a nice surprise!

So the one question left on my mind is this: will we be able to boot into Windows on these new intel Macs? You could easily do so on the DTKs, but they were an anomaly. From what I understand, the new EFI-based Macs preclude booting Windows simply because Windows doesn't know how to boot off an intel box that uses EFI instead of the old BIOS stuff. This is where speculation comes into play though - there's talk that in some cases, EFI has a "BIOS compatibility" mode that would allow this, but it's unknown yet if the new Macs include this. From a purely Apple-centric standpoint, they wouldn't need to include this since no Mac software needs the legacy BIOS from a PC - unless you wanted to boot Windows. So I'm anxiously awaiting the verdict on that.

The reason why I'm anxious is of course directly related to my work. As a Mac user and fan, I think it'd be fantastic if these new Macs could boot Windows, even if it were unsupported. As a Mac developer - one whose job relies solely on porting software from Windows to the Mac - I'm very much against anything that would effectively eliminate my job. And while it's not clear yet if a Windows-booting Mac would do that, enough Mac gamers have expressed an interest in the option as to give me an ulcer. And speaking as a Mac end-user myself, I'd be chomping at the bit for such an option myself. In all likelihood, if Mac gaming spirals down the drain, I'll go down riding the wave until I'm forced into another job, but boy - I'd sure rather not. :-)

(BTW, my Aspyr colleague John Butler wondered if Apple would rename the intel PowerMac to MacMac Pro, following Apple's PowerBook -> MacBook Pro rebranding, hence the title of this entry.)