While wondering if people hadn’t got the wrong end of the stick from Ross’ MCE Upgrade Open Letter, I ran across another of his posts – My Next PC Might Be A Mac? Running Windows?
I was initially quite excited about getting a Mac and putting Windows on it, but since the original X86 announcement, that’s faded to a “perhaps” – if Macs aren’t really user-serviceable, then I’m out of the market – I’ve had to make that many additions, removals, replacements and tweaks to my current PCs that they don’t really resemble what they started out as at all… and Apple – being the control freaks that they appear to be – probably wouldn’t encourage that.
Ross quoted an interesting comment by Doug Mohney (of Le Inq), suggesting that perhaps Macs would be the winner, as Windows emulation might get easier, so buying a Mac might be a “best of both worlds” proposition.
But I had a slightly different take, more like Katamari Damacy:
From what I’ve gathered to date: Mac OS will exclusively run on Mac PCs, but Windows Vista may well run on Macintosh X86 PCs as well as all the other X86s out there. Which means that the potential Windows market is 100%, but the Mac OS market is only the Macs. To grow OS penetration, Apple have to move machines, machines that won’t eventually have Windows installed on them.
I wouldn’t be surprised if Apple decreed/arranged that Windows would be incompatible with Mac hardware, as the game looks stacked in Windows’ favour from where I’m sitting. Still, they might turn out to be a nice new white-box vendor!