Windows on the Mac, Revisited

One of the comments on a recent post points out that he (or she?) has blogged on this topic before and in more detail. (I'm hardly the first to observe that WINE, Crossover, et al are, at least conceptually, a far better solution to this problem than Parallels or Boot Camp.)

However, on reading his comments, which I summarize below as five reasons Apple should do this and five reasons it shouldn't (I've paraphrased and renumbered):

Reasons it Should

1. The hard work is done (WINE etc.)
2. Since they're dropping Classic support...
3. Vista will not support EFI in first release...
4. Apple desperately wants to break into the Enterprise market...
5. Leopard seems to have few compelling new features

Reasons it Shouldn't

6. Fear of Microsoft retaliating
7. Support would be a nightmare
8. Microsoft's Mac Business Unit would be alienated
9. Not a new issue and they've never done it before
10. It's not very Apple

Here's my reaction to said reasons.
1. Agreed.
2. That's just stupid. It's not a reason.
3. Irrelevant.
4. Yes, but so what?
5. So, you know what's in Leopard?!
6. Far-fetched. What could Microsoft try* to do that's more malicious than "Zune"?
7. Absolutely true and a good point. Might have to be a free download "beta" like Boot Camp.
8. Possibly true.
9. Completely and utterly wrong. Aside from some horrible kludges (like Mac Charlie and the PC compatibility card for early PowerPC Macs) which were essentially low-end PCs that shared the Mac's monitor, Apple has never had x86 CPUs in its machines, and Mac OS has never run on x86 CPUs.
10. Simply a matter of opinion, and I think far MORE Apple like than Boot Camp or Apple's previous PC compatibility efforts.
* Actually, Zune is probably a gift for Apple, since the real victims are PlaysForSure licensees. But I doubt Microsoft considered Apple's feelings.

Mentioned, but not enumerated, is a very important reason -- the fact that a company which is on the cusp of developing a native Mac version of a program might decide simply to support the Mac's Win32 compatibility layer instead. This is a real issue, but it's not really clear that it doesn't already exist because of Parallels and Boot Camp. If it's a key productivity app, then chances are you'll want it native. Photoshop native is going to kick pretend Photoshop native for the foreseeable future.

The Bottom Line

Apple's core PC market is people who buy their own computers or can tell their company which computer to buy for them. The whole enterprise thing is never going to work out because enterprise IT hates, loathes, and fears Apple (subject of another blog post I think :-) ).

There are a certain number of people out there who want to use both a Mac and a PC for whatever reason. (I'm one of them.) You can only really use one at a time. I would argue that the vast majority of these people want to use their Macs for almost everything and their PCs for gaming and/or 3D apps (like 3DS Max) and one or two random Windows-only apps.

At the moment, Apple and Dell (say) are selling these folks two computers every X months for 1.7Y dollars. If Apple can produce a computer for Y dollars that serves all these people's needs then their customers will be very happy, and either upgrade more frequently or buy a higher end computer. In my case I'd also save on desk space, power bills, fan noise, and carpet wear from sliding my chair from desk to desk).

If Apple is working on this, it's doing a very good job of keeping it secret (e.g. it is either doing it from scratch -- unlikely -- or working on Open Source projects and either not pushing back its changes or somehow concealing its contributions or working with someone like Codeweavers and maintaining absolute radio silence). So it probably isn't. That said, the solution I'm describing is going to happen whether Apple does it or not. So all the arguments against it are, in the end, irrelevant.