Some of our regular readers may recall a stupid and irresponsible rumor we started right here on this blog, that being the idea, based on a slip by an Apple PR type, that future Macs might shortly ship with Vista pre-installed as a dual-boot option for Leopard. The idea isn’t just to run Windows, but to run Windows apps in the Mac OS. Many of you scoffed at the idea, and we even thought it bogus ourselves.
Then a coworker showed me the Unity in VMware Fusion video above, and you can see just such things happening. We’re not saying Leopard’s going to ship with this type of scenario, but it certainly does stoke the fire and add food for thought, and other metaphors.
But can it crash like Windows? Do it show the Blue Screen of Death?
Well it’d be good news for Mac users at least. Maybe if it came with Vista, they’d be able to actually do useful stuff with their computers! (Ohhh burn)
This is EXACTLY what Parallels will do today on any Intel-based Mac. They have a poorly documented mode called “Coherence” that allows Windows apps to appear side by side with OSX apps. I recently bought a MacBook and have a ton of expensive XP apps (Office Premium, Photoshop, Illustrator & Dreamweaver) and I run them all using Parallels under OSX… It works like a champ.
@ fewquid: Yah, coherence is pretty dope. I just sort of meant to use this as an illustration of the previous post linked within. Rumors are it’ll be built-in to Leopard. I still think it’s hogwash, but we fanboys can dream, right? :)
And you’re right about it being poorly documented.
Wow…
Parallels has been able to do this for several months now. Not to mention 3D acceleration in Parallels coming soon.
Guys, watch the video again: VMware’s Unity is one notch or two above Parallels’ Coherence. Parallels puts all the windows in a VM on one layer. This mean you cannot Expose or Command-Tab between 2 apps in the VM. VMware has no problem doing that, because it pulls each Windows window (sic) as a Mac OS window. That is also why VMware can properly do drop shadows and z-order.
Also VMware Fusion’s DirectX support was released before Parallels, and it is still better than the DirectX support (not the OpenGL support) that Parallels is promising in its (currently in private beta) version 3.0.
OpenGL games are trivially ported to Mac OS which “speaks” OpenGL, so I don’t need to run them in a VM. Good DirectX support in a VM is the only thing that matters as far as 3D is concerned, and so far VMware is still winning that battle.