No Vista For Intel Mac

Jack Writes: Dispelling the rumours and the speculation which referred to both Vista and Mac OS X using EFI (Extensible Firmware Interface) software when they launch in order to achieve a better compatibility, Apple announced that Intel Macs are "unlikely" to be able to run Vista.

Windows Vista will not in all likelihood run on Intel Macs without a purpose-built emulator, said to Apple senior software architect Cameron Esfahani.

Because the 32-bit versions of Vista will continue to use their standard Basic Input/Output System (BIOS) during start-up and only the 64-bit Vista is said to support the Extensible Firmware Interface system, 32-bit Intel Mac users will have to settle only for Mac OS X on their systems.

"EFI is the modern and flexible successor to the 20-year-old PC BIOS. It is responsible for initialising hardware in the PC, and importantly, device drivers are stored in the EFI flash memory rather than being loaded by the operating system," said Dan Warne in APC Mag.

"That's terrible news for Intel Mac users who have been hoping that they could dual-boot Windows and Mac OS X on their new Macs: not only are their processors not 64bit (and thus will never be supported by Windows EFI booting), but Windows Vista won't boot on EFI anyway," Warne added.

Esfahani confirmed the fact that Apple's Mac OS X integrates only limited support for EFI and there's no "legacy" code included for older devices and hardware.

However, according to a recent note from Needham &Co analyst Charles Wolf, it seems that if Apple will make its Intel Macs capable of running Windows, the company's market share could substantially rise to over 9 percent.