Macintelindows.

Great writeup on Apple’s move to support Windows dual-booting on their new Intel machines. As they say, it’s one of those moves that seems completely obvious now and just 48 hours ago seemed sort of impossible. I got an Intel Mac about a week ago and jumped through some hoops to get the community-created solution installed (which, by the way, is a brilliant example of how the hyperconnected Internet is changing things in a very positive way) — and have now switched over to Apple’s, for driver support & wonky-reducing reasons.

It’s working great. Everything works well, very fast, very compelling.

Here’s the important bit out of the article I pointed to:

The old equation — decades old — is that most computers ran Windows (or, if you go back far enough, DOS) and some other ones, the ones from Apple, ran Mac OS. As of today, the new equation is that all computers can run Windows, but some, the special ones from Apple, also run Mac OS X. (Including other PC operating systems like the various Linux distributions doesn’t really change the equation.)

The distinction between these two equations may strike you as subtle, but the difference is potentially momentous. The point is that it recasts Macs from being “different” to being “special”. Instead of occupying a separate universe from that of PC hardware, it’s now a superset of PC hardware. Instead of choosing between a Windows PC or a Mac — which decision, as I wrote recently, for most people is more accurately stated as “choosing between a familiar Windows PC or an unfamiliar Mac” — you now get to choose between a computer that can only run Windows or a computer that can run both Windows and Mac OS X.

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