January 11, 2006

EFI BIOS in the Intel Macs may be a roadblock

Another thing from the unsanity posting mentioned earlier. The different "BIOS" used in these Intel Macs may be a barrier to running Windows on the Apple box, and/or to running OS X on a generic Intel PC box.

I should also mention that these new ICBMs from Apple use EFI instead of the standard PC BIOS. According to various documents from Microsoft, Windows for x86 machines does not support booting from EFI and won't until Windows Vista is released. As far as I know, no consumer PC ships with EFI support (why bother if Windows doesn't support it, right?). However, the Itanium machines require EFI. This has two "problems". One, you may not be able to dual boot Windows until Vista is released. Two, it'll be significantly harder to make OS X run on a stock PC without EFI.
Posted by jackhodgson at January 11, 2006 09:19 AM