Out of the Box

Lifehacker has an update to its story about installing Mac OS X on a PC, creating what it calls a Hackintosh. Apple frowns on such a practice. Its tight control of hardware is part of what enables it to advance the platform with greater agility than Microsoft.

Comments to the story report generally good success with the hack. One commenter notes that he would use the technique to test-drive Mac OS X before buying a Mac.

With Apple taking the offensive against Vista, it might further entice Windows users to switch by allowing them to trial Mac OS X without having to buy into the hardware first. Like many Linux installation CDs, the Leopard trial DVD could run from the disc but not allow any modifications to the hard drive or allow consumers to save files.

On the other hand, there might of course be driver issues as well as sluggish performance coming off the DVD drive and the last thing Apple wants to convey to Windows users is a slow, unreliable experience. Insert your Microsoft OS joke here.

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For most of the time I’ve been aware of his platform proclivities, my cousin Alan, a cardiologist, was not much of a Mac fan. However, he recently purchased a MacBook Pro and is loving it. I think he is an interesting case study for how Apple is attracting more Windows users.

He first bought an iBook for his wife, a computer novice. Then he had interest in a way to run two computationally intensive Windows-only medical programs on a Mac. After debating Parallels and VMWare, he chose the latter. The result, he says, is just "amazing"; the programs are running well in VMWare’s "unity" mode which allows the running of Windows applications in the context of the Mac operating environment. He also praised the program’s automatic configuration for Windows XP.

He’s not blind to the Mac’s faults and still prefers the way Roxio dealt with rewriteable DVDs and CDs so he’s using that Wndows program under VMWare as well.

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