With the news yesterday that Apple is shipping it’s first round of Intel Macs, some fans were happy to finally be able to dual-boot into Windows or Mac OS X. But it seems that won’t be possible. With the switch to Intel processors, Apple has moved from Open Firmware to EFI, which is an updated BIOS specification developed by Intel.
Intel initially deployed EFI as part of its Itanium architecture. As such, Microsoft only included support for the BIOS replacement in its IA64 and later x64 operating systems. While Microsoft plans to add EFI support in 32-bit versions of Windows Vista, a final release isn’t due until the end of the year.
But there also goes the massive opportunity of users locked into using Windows but wanting to use Apple hardware. Unlucky.
