A thought about this bit Macintosh on Intel news.

[brooksmoses]

So, it appears that the latest Apple announcement (that future Macs will use Intel, not IBM, processors, starting in a year or so) is being mentioned in nearly every computer-oriented blog and news source on the planet. Therefore, I can't risk being left behind, and must say something on it.

One thing I haven't seen mentioned yet, though, is this question: How long after OS/X-on-Intel comes out will it take for there to be a Wine-on-OS/X? And, when it does, will it be an GPL'ed Wine product, or will it be an Apple product?

If Apple can produce a MacOS that runs Windows applications, even in a limited way, that would be a very interesting answer to the "there's less software for Mac" and "the software I want to use doesn't run on a Mac" arguments. I don't know whether it will actually be possible, mind -- I don't know how close the hardware architecture needs to be for Wintel applications to run on a non-PC i86 computer, nor how close the Mac architecture will actually be (my guess: not especially), but it's a nice thought.

How about it? Alexei? Eric?

(Yeah, yeah, I know. "It is Apple's policy not to comment on unreleased products.")

Comments

[leback.livejournal.com]

Well, Alexei and Eric *are* probably as well-qualified as anybody to answer that one...

(I knew it! I knew that was what he was doing! I knew it!)

[myshkintheidiot.livejournal.com]

I am very uninformed here, but OpenDarwin's Darwine project indicates that Wine-on-PPC-OS X is very possible, if perhaps not so immediately practical. So Wine-on-x86-OS X would probably not require a huge technical investment for minimal functionality. That's presumably not enough, though; I suspect Apple would want integration with Cocoa, Quartz, and all the other Mac OS X goodies. In addition, of course, there are the non-technical issues of how much Apple wants to make Microsoft angry...