An interesting Intel iMac and MacBook tidbit -- Windows won't boot

Thanks to Daring Fireball, who pointed me at this article on BetaNews, apparently Windows XP won't boot on the new Intel-based iMacs and MacBooks announced yesterday. Why, you might ask? Because the new machines don't have a Basic I/O System (BIOS); instead they use the new Extended Firmware Interface (EFI) Intel specification for their read-only memories, which Windows doesn't support. Why doesn't Windows support it? It was just finished last summer, and there haven't been any Windows releases since. Even if you happen to have a 64-bit Windows version which does support EFI, it won't boot because these are 32-bit machines.

Now if there were only a native version of Virtual PC for the MacIntel machines, that presumably would work fine. Hmmm. Despite that being part of at least one Premium version of Microsoft Office for the Mac, I don't remember that being mentioned yesterday.

Undoubtedly some hacker will find a way around this, but for the moment, dual-boot Macs aren't going to be easy to set up.

Technorati Tags: Dual Boot, Apple, Macintosh, MacIntel, Windows, BIOS, EFI, Microsoft