Recently in This Apple is ripe, this Apple is sweet Category

Two interesting products for MacOS X appeared this week - Apple's Boot Camp and Parallels' Workstation.

Boot Camp is Apple's answer to Microsoft's "we will not make Vista EFI-Compatible". It allows you to repartition your disk drive to make space for Windows XP and then it creates a helper CD with a set of drivers that allow XP to install on the new Intel-powered Macs. Brilliant.

Parallels workstation is the first virtualization software for Intel MacOS X. This way you can run Linux, OS/2 Warp and why not, Windows, as virtual machines on your Mac.

Both products are beta. Parallels' website was experiencing problems yesterday due to the high traffic.

Boot Camp
Parallels workstation for Intel MacOS X

Technorati tags: Parallels

Looks like the new Intel-based Mac's will not be running XP, 2000 or other ancient operating system such as 9x'es. Betanews has a report explaining why.

If you don't have the time to check the link, I'll explain it in short here.

The new Intel-based Mac's use Intel's new BIOS specification, called EFI (Extensible Firmware Interface). Support for EFI exists in most recent Windows versions, such as 2003 x64, or the IA-64 Windows variants. On the other hand, x86 XP or other 2003 versions do not support EFI. Last of all, Mac's use the Intel Duo Core CPU, which is Pentium-M-based, and doesn't have EM64T, so it can't run in 64 bits mode. So, no Windows XP on Mac - yet.

However, Microsoft is planning to make their final release of Vista compatible with EFI on 32 bit, meaning you will be able to run Windows on Mac's. If all goes well (and there's a big "if" here) Vista will hit the market at the end of 2006.

Of course, until then Apple will have enough time to sell enough Intel-based Mac's and enthusiasts will have enough time to hack MacOS into running on standard x86 hardware. As a result, Apple's OS-market share will increase slightly. A brilliant move and it doesn't even look like they've built the new Mac's in such a way that makes them unable to run current versions of Windows.

It's no surprise that the Apple shares hit an all-time high on Wednesday, following the announcement of the new Intel-based Mac's.

The first Macs with Intel CPU's have just been announced: the 15" MacBook's and the new 17"/20" iMac's. Both use the new Intel Core Duo CPUs (aka "Yonah" a dual-core Pentium M) built in 65-nanometer process. No word of an Intel-based MacMini, so far.

For the same price, you get four times the speed of a PowerBook or twice the speed of an PowerPC-based iMac, says Apple (now).

The Intel-based Mac's run MacOSX 10.4.4 for x86, which is able to emulate a PowerPC G3 CPU at modest speeds. There is no AltiVec emulation whatsoever, meaning that once you get a new Intel-based Mac, you'll have to find Intel versions of all your power applications, ~especially~ Photoshop, which is maybe the most important reason alone for which professionals used to buy Mac's instead of PC's.

Job's announcement from today marks the end of an era which lasted for almost a decade - the era of the PowerPC-based Mac's. With Apple being the largest client for IBM's PowerPC processor making division, this will most likely result in a severe jobs cut, although it's for sure that the PowerPC will not die. Actually, lots of new cars (eg. the new BMW 7 series) use various types of PowerPC's for the control systems which take care of the engine and other essential subsystems.

PS: I wonder if the new Mac's can run Windows. In theory, Apple could build an x86 computer on which Windows doesn't work, but the question is if they actually did it. Sure thing, if I were Jobs, I'd have done it. Then again, I'm not. :)

Across the street from our office there is a Pizza Restaurant. Actually, there was one - because they've just closed it down for renovation. The new banner says it will become a Cafe starting with December 1st and the coffee-addicted part of me is (okay, maybe a little bit suspiciously) looking forward to it.

One of the reasons for which the Pizza Restaurant Across The Street From Our Office (F.K.A. "PRATSFOO") closed was that nobody was really going there to buy pizza. Being an office building where most of the companies have something to do with IT, and because IT people are so lazy, everybody was simply ordering pizza on phone. Needless to say, the Pizza Restaurant across the street didn't take orders on phone. This turned out to be a fatal design flaw (*). As I've already explained, the solution to this design flaw was the replacement of the pizza owens with coffee-making machines. Now, since almost every company which has something to do with IT has a coffee machine in the office, I seriously doubt the success of the upcoming Cafe, but that is not the point here.

People tend to be lazy. If presented with a set of options, they will most likely chose the one which involves less walking, moving, writing and thinking. For one product to be successfull, it has to be simple and straightforward. It has to fullfill a function and nothing more. (products which fullfill more functions than most people need appeal to another category, which is usually called "geeks")

With the in mind, the success of Apple's MacOS X is truly a notable exception.

Designed to be nice, clean and sometimes annoyingly straightforward, the operating system appeals to that no-nonsense category of people who buy iPods (because they are cute and trendy), P&S digicams (because they are trendy) and other - you name it (because it is trendy or cute) - underfeatured appliances. On the other hand, Apple's MacOS X comes with a strong Unix core under the hood. A hood which can be accessed the geeks and the like. So if you come to think of it, being both no-nonsense and having thousand of hidden functions under the hood is probably the main reason behind Mac OS X' success.

Back to our friends from across the street, the geek in me can't help thinking: how about a Cafe which also does pizza with home delivery?

PS: WiFi in the Cafe would also be nice.

(*) - suggested further reading on fatal design flaws and other frightening things: all of Steve McConnell's books.