Windows Apps on OS X 10.5

Chardee MacDennis

Well rumours are starting regarding windows apps running on 10.5 and now Apple have joind BAPCo, the industry-standard Windows benchmarking consortium.

Lets hope its true, could mean another new era for Apple.

jtsuited

yes because then we'd be able to run all those highly stable and reliable windows programs.
What windows programs would you want to run on a mac?
There's so much talk about this lately and i just have yet to see the point.
Please enlighten me?

Chardee MacDennis

well for one games and windows software tends to be cheaper - go in to The Apple Centre in town and tell me you would pay 50/60 euro for Halo and Tomb Raider III - an absolute joke.

Also it would help people switching over - if they had Office for Windows and didnt want to have to buy Office for Mac etc.

also it would encourage people to switch if there was a greater amount of interoperability. This would potentially mean lower prices for us as greater economies of scale would be present, if Apple managed to increase their market share from 5% to 10,15 or even 20%.

There may be enough demand in Ireland to finally get Apple to give us an Apple Store.

i think it is a good thing. you dont have to run the programmes if you dont want to, but surely the option is good to have. You dont see too many Linux users give out that they emulators like WINE available to them.

sturgo

I can't imagine why anyone would want to run XP on a Mac. That's like putting a Micra engine into a Lexus. There's enough demand for an Apple store already, I'd say it's just a matter of time.

Mutant_Fruit

yes because then we'd be able to run all those highly stable and reliable windows programs.

Well, what makes developers for Mac programs so much better than developers for windows programs? They are both equally likely to make mistakes programming. Now whether that mistake freezes the whole OS or just makes the application crash really depends on how the OS itself handles errors...

Laguna

Well I for one would make the total transition to Mac computers if games designed for Windows were up and running on the platform, the only reason I keep a Windows based PC going alongside my Mac hardware is to play PC games. I forsee the problem of not having DirectX on Macs as the main stumbling block for windows games not being able to run on Apple based computers (or in the near future, as if MS would license DirectX to Apple, cutting a chunk out of their own OS sales).

If only Apple get a larger slice of the market then games companies would release their games with universal binaries so I can at long last bid farewell to Bill Gates's bloated malware.

silverlining

Dont forget hardware support as well, I recently installed windows as a dual-boot option on a 17" intel imac in order to get a USB to ethernet adapter working that wouldnt work in OSX (no drivers). My friend needed to set up his mac as a router for a tunneling application because he couldnt afford a standalone router. I'm sure there are other windows specific hardware devices that would be handy to be able to use as well but I dont see people replacing OSX with windows as their OS of choice, in fact I thin it will just reinforce people's love of OSX

Ruaidhri

This certainly would be an interesting feature. Considering that Vistas UI is going to be ported to OS X, and with (almost) the same hardware platform as windows, this is a possibility.

Jesus, if this happened, OS X users would have access to UNIX programs, MAC OS X apps and Windows Apps!

Now the name universal binaries makes sense :P