Apple: 'Don't expect Mactels to run Vista'

by admin March 10, 2006 at 1:24 pm

“Windows is a legacy OS. We don’t have legacy support”

Intel Macs are unlikely to be able to run Windows Vista, according to an Apple engineer speaking on Thursday.

One of the big obstacles is that although both the Macintosh OS and Windows now use Intel chips, the two operating systems have different ways of booting up.

Mac fans have held out considerable hope that the next version of Windows would be easier to load on Macs than Windows XP, because like Mac OS X, Vista will use Extensible Firmware Interface (EFI) to aid the boot process. Older versions of Windows have used Basic Input Output System (Bios).

However, Apple senior software architect Cameron Esfahani said his understanding is that only 64-bit versions of Vista will support EFI. To this point, all of the Intel Macs have used 32-bit chips.

When asked whether Intel Macs should easily run Vista, Esfahani said: “I don’t think so.” He was speaking at the Intel Developer Forum in San Francisco – to a packed room despite the session being the last of the conference.

In addition, while EFI has the prospects for supporting many older types of software and hardware, Apple has not included much of that “legacy” code in its EFI implementation. “Windows is a legacy OS,” Esfahani said, to laughter and applause from the crowd. “We don’t have legacy support.”

Read more: silicon.com