On 5 Apr 2006 at 20:18, Mark D Lew wrote: > On Apr 5, 2006, at 11:32 AM, David W. Fenton wrote: > > > This is not going to last long, though. Microsoft recently announced > > that Windows Vista (the next major release of Windows, the release > > of which was recently delayed into 2007) will not boot under EFI (or > > whatever the Apple equivalent to the BIOS is). Of course, I wouldn't > > have thought that WinXP would be able to, either, so maybe it will > > work after all. > > But presumably if one is considering switching from Windows to Mac, > one doesn't care as much that the Mac will run *tomorrow's* Windows > apps, so long as it runs the ones that one already owns.
Well, as long as you're happy to stay with the old generation of Windows apps. Vista (and then the second Longhorn iteration, the server counterpart to Vista, which I hope will implement the file system innovations that had to be dropped from Vista to get it released within the current decade) is a whole new version of Windows. The graphics engine is completely re-written (mostly to copy things from OS X's Quartz, seems to me), and the UI is changed extensively. This latter is the important part. The Windows UI has remained quite constant since the release of Win95. Vista is a huge change. Microsoft is extensively rewriting its Office programs to take advantage of the new UI innovations (I'm not sure how I feel about them -- they look pretty in the screenshots, but I don't know if they will really have that much more utility for experienced users), and this will, I think, constitute a huge leap forward in interface design. This is one of those rare moments, I think, when the "innovation" trumpeted by Microsoft actually has some substance to it, and where the upgrade to get the new UI will be worthwhile. I know that Vista will have a standard Windows Classic UI (just like WinXP), but I don't know what kind of support there will be for the ribbon UI and the new menu structures under Windows Classic, or for Office 12 (and other Vista-oriented applications) running under WinXP. I do know that Win2K will basically be out of the loop for these new apps (they won't be supported, so far as I can tell, which is a shame, as the relationship between WinXP and Win2K is much like that between Win98 and Win95 -- mostly cosmetic differences and only a few underlying technologies that differ and that could easily be installed in the older OS to make it have the same features as the newer version). An inability to run Vista will be no real problem for Mac users who want a sometime Windows box to run Windows programs. But for Windows users who would buy a Mac to dual boot, but would still maintain their strong commitment to Windows (I'm one of those users -- a MacIntel Mini looks *very* attractive to me right now), this becomes a long-term problem, as Vista is due out in about a year from now. My needs are often driven by those of my clients (I have to be able to program for the systems they have in place), and after 2007, it's unlikely that any of them will any longer be buying WinXP systems. I'll need to adapt to that. So, in 2008, the ability to dual boot Mac/Vista would then become essential. I don't know the level of difficulty of the 32-bit EFI problem (i.e., perhaps it's relatively trivial for Apple to solve with the add-on BIOS support), or if, perhaps, the availability of 64-bit MacIntels would eliminate the problem entirely. -- David W. Fenton http://dfenton.com David Fenton Associates http://dfenton.com/DFA/ _______________________________________________ Finale mailing list [email protected] http://lists.shsu.edu/mailman/listinfo/finale
