In fact, they actually ENDORSE such a process through Virtual PC. Like Parallels, Windows is NOT EMULATED, but rather is run natively on either Windows or iMac Intel.

This brings in more cash for Microsoft as not only can people run many flavors of Windows on Mac, but even Windows Vista is supported (just not its core feature: Windows Vista Aero).

The only people who wouldn’t make money in a situation such as this are the PC manufacturers. If PCs and Macs can run side-by-side, people wouldn’t buy as many PCs. The plus side for PC manufacturers, though is that the speed of Virtual PC for Mac is very slow and 3D gaming is not supported. So for something like that, nothing is better than the real thing.

What WOULD cause problems, is if that someone found a way to emulate the PowerPC on a PC (like the creator of PearPC, for instance). He has already acheived close to 100% of the CPU emulated. The only setbacks are that it is very slow, no sound is enabled, Mac OS X v10.0.3 Beta doesn’t work (simply because it was made as an upgrade from Mac OS 9), and on top of that, Apple’s Classic Support doesn’t work. All that aside, Apple would still definetly lose money off the Mac hardware, being that their computers go for at least $2000. However, they would still take in money from Mac OS X Tiger System Software sales.

15 years ago, at high school, the Smaky computers we used had four “virtual desktops” — of course, you couldn’t run a separate OS in one of them :-)

What sounds nice here is that the combination with virtual machines like Parallels make an OS just another application. I’ll be able to have OSX on one screen and XP in the other even without plugging in my second monitor.

Neat! Excited.

http://www.codeweavers.com/products/differences/

http://www.maconintel.com/news.php?article=21

(on this latter site it is slightly explained)

For the clueless people here this is windows applications running natively on the hardware, under MacIntel or Linux, without windows and without emulation.
Get it? NO EMULATION – RUNNING ON HARDWARE.

( some people here find it very hard to grasp this fact…being conditioned by years of different processors = different OS’s and the shortage of processor grunt and expensive ram that made running two OS’s at the same time on the same hardware not feasible. Now we have considerable hardware muscle and lots of ram – but most of all OS’s whose underpinnings are Unix or Unix derived as Linux.)

So what is to stop Apple from putting all of XP or Vista into a CCSM? Nothing, absolutely nothing. There is no barrier whatsoever. In fact they started working on it at NEXT. If Apple wants to do this, nothing stopping them.
However, the incidence of multicore processors, the BSD unix subsystem and cheap ram make it a slamdunk.
To myself however, I wonder if Apple is that daring to actually steal Windows from Microsoft in this way. Think about it, if windows itself will run under OSX – if potentially all windows applications run under OSX – why would anyone run Windows except for the cheap hardware? Microsoft really wouldn’t be that threatened, in the short term – they still sell the applications and code for the CCSM’s…
I’m not altogether certain Apple will go this route. When Leopard is released one will be able to draw more accurate conclusions. But if they want to do this – there is no barrier to doing it. This is the purpose of the speculation in this article.

Before another genius remarks ‘this is just emulation…’ please do a little research. Work to run two OS’s off the same hardware with a master OS providing crossover support and controlling hardware access was started from different directions at least a decade ago.

“Rings” are also the terminology for levels of OS privileges. “Ring 0″ is typically the level where the OS runs, and “Ring 3″ is where regular user programs run. (For portability, most operating systems only use 2 rings instead of the 4 levels available on x86.) Each ring can control/intercept rings above it. Ring 0 is usually at the bottom, with control over the entire machine.

Newer Intel and AMD chips support “Ring -1″, which is a level that can control Ring 0 programs, including entire operating systems. In the title of this blog post, “Lord of the Rings” has a dual meaning, in that there now is a “Negative One Ring to Rule Them All”. This is used by Parallels, and likely would be used by Apple to run Windows on another desktop.

Do you have any proof or are you just guessing?

As for enterprise not wanting it…they may not want it for thier bottom line workstations…but in terms of securing multiple redundant databases it will be huge. In terms of what the Man wants on his desk and the front office…the demand is there. People working in Prepress, design, music, film and content creation…they will opt for a Mac Pro Quads or Octo’s probably more often than not and save the budget computers for the renderfarms.

As more people use OSX only a minority will hate it and look to disparage it at every turn. They will become unimportant , because OSX is a joy to use and run. It is the operating system of the future…along with linux…but OSX runs Linux and not visa versa (for now…)

There will always be competition and choice in the market. Although Apple is going to shake up and revolutionize the computer industry (again)…it’s going to offer something Microsoft hasn’t seen for a long time – competition. And for the purpose of people out there who just want a great system – choice. Three strong options for choices in a OS is good for everybody.

In most cases I’ve found that Windows XP running on Parellels is as fast as a native PC box (assuming sufficient memory).

The kind of setup the author is describing is kind of possible already with Parallels and VirtueDesktops.