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"We haven't done anything to explicitly prevent it, but we haven't done anything to encourage it either," Apple Senior Product Line Manager Wiley Hodges said of running Windows on Macs during a presentation Thursday at the MacWorld Conference & Expo in San Francisco this week.
Apple introduced two new Intel-based machines, an iMac desktop and the MacBook notebook, at MacWorld. The iMac is available now, with the MacBook scheduled to ship in February but available for ordering on Tuesday.
Even without specific help from Apple, the existence of Macs built on Intel's x86 instruction set eventually will give users a choice of OSes to run on their new Apple machines. Analysts believe it won't be long before someone comes up with a version of Windows that runs natively on the new Intel-based Macs, even despite a firmware incompatibility issue that prevents Microsoft's operating system from running on the new Intel-based Macs.
Apple's Intel-based Macs support extensible firmware interface (EFI), whereas Microsoft's Windows XP supports BIOS, and the two are not natively interoperable. EFI and BIOS control the basic functions a computer can do, such as start up and boot up the OS, without accessing programs from its hard drive.
"I have no doubt that a clever person would figure out how to make it work even if Apple doesn't support that," says Dan Kusnetzky, program vice president at IDC. "I've been amazed at how people have looked at vendor choices and found a way to do what they wanted to do anyway."
"We haven't done anything to explicitly prevent it, but we haven't done anything to encourage it either," Apple Senior Product Line Manager Wiley Hodges said of running Windows on Macs during a presentation Thursday at the MacWorld Conference & Expo in San Francisco this week.
Apple introduced two new Intel-based machines, an iMac desktop and the MacBook notebook, at MacWorld. The iMac is available now, with the MacBook scheduled to ship in February but available for ordering on Tuesday.
Even without specific help from Apple, the existence of Macs built on Intel's x86 instruction set eventually will give users a choice of OSes to run on their new Apple machines. Analysts believe it won't be long before someone comes up with a version of Windows that runs natively on the new Intel-based Macs, even despite a firmware incompatibility issue that prevents Microsoft's operating system from running on the new Intel-based Macs.
Apple's Intel-based Macs support extensible firmware interface (EFI), whereas Microsoft's Windows XP supports BIOS, and the two are not natively interoperable. EFI and BIOS control the basic functions a computer can do, such as start up and boot up the OS, without accessing programs from its hard drive.
"I have no doubt that a clever person would figure out how to make it work even if Apple doesn't support that," says Dan Kusnetzky, program vice president at IDC. "I've been amazed at how people have looked at vendor choices and found a way to do what they wanted to do anyway."
