More thoughts on virtualization and Intel Macs

Running Windows on our Mac is something many of us would like to do. You can do it now with emulation, but it's fairly painful. Once Mac is on Intel, it should be far more slick.

I'm no expert on virtual machines, but I would think it would be less difficult to virtualize Windows on Mac than vice versa, even after the change to Intel. The Mac v-product would have the advantage of working with an OS (Windows) that is designed to run on variable hardware, so it's (relatively) easy to give it a virtual environment where it will play happily (and other OSes like Linux and most hobby OSes would also). And of course, once running on Intel, there's no emulation or translation layer necessary: Intel code is Intel code.

On the other hand, making a player for Mac is a special project. Rather than emulating generic hardware, you need to emulate specific hardware; worse, that hardware is subject to change at any time and OS X may change with it in ways that make your virtualization more difficult.

I therefore see Apple as being in the proverbial cat-bird's seat here. It will be (relatively) easy to virtualize Windows under OS X, but more difficult to do the reverse. Not necessarily impossible, but my guess is the OS X box running Windows as a guest would be smoother and less buggy.

Time to buy more Apple stock, I think.

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Fri Jun 23 17:18:17 2006:   TonyLawrence


Recently VMWare has said they are playing with Intel Macs in their labs.. but also there are strong rumors that virtualization will be built into the 10.5 release due this year (2006)



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