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Windows on Mac Hardware, No Mac on Generic Hardware

For those of you who are interested, someone has managed to get Windows XP to boot on an Intel Mac.

The first hint that “narf” may have figured it out came in the form of a set of photos on Flickr that seemed to show Windows XP on an iMac of some sort. Next came the videos and an acknowledgement from the contest administrators that a solution had been submitted. And finally, this morning, onmac.net announced that a proposed solution had been found and had been tested successfully. The contest had been won, and it looks like “narf” is about to almost US$14,000 richer.

The WindowsXP on Mac website has now posted the solution developed by Narf. It is fairly complicated and will probably be a little difficult for novice users to get a handle on, but I’m certain that an easier, more accessible way to deploy this will become available in a relatively short amount of time. The only downfall that I can see is that you’ll need a PC to complete the process, which defeats the purpose of this exercise for a portion of the people who’ve been anticipating this solution.

And, as a counterpoint, here is an interesting article about why OS X shouldn’t be sold for generic PCs

The appeal of the Mac OS is successful integration of it with the hardware; something that is available only when one company owns the whole setup.

Now, realistically, could this be accomplished for the PC world? Well sure. Just buy one, each, of the following:

  1. Every motherboard sold since 2000.
  2. Every sound card sold since 2000.
  3. Every video card sold since 2000.
  4. Every processor sold since 2000.
  5. Every CD-ROM sold since 2000.
  6. Every keyboard, mouse, joystick, and touchpad sold since 2000.

Then one of each of the following:

  1. Every complete desktop system sold since 2000 by a major manufacturer (Dell, Compaq, Gateway, HP, etc.).
  2. Their portables, too.

Now, write support for them all in the OS to the level the Mac has support of all their computers back to 2000. At this point we can safely say that the Mac OS would be equal on PC to the Mac OS on the Macintosh. It will also occupy three DVDs and have piss-poor support for half of the devices.

Interesting times in the Mac world.