How I want my Mactel to work

When I buy my Intel-based Mac laptop next year, I want to run Mac OS X and Windows on it at the same time. There's no need for Windows (or Virtual PC) to emulate Intel/Windows hardware any more, because the actual hardware is there. In this dream, Windows/VPC is not running as an OS X app: it's full-on Windows with special magic stuff going on behind the scenes so it can talk to OS X. A configurable keystroke or gesture switches between operating systems, complete with a cube-flip animation. I can copy and paste between operating systems. Each OS has a window or some other proxy that represents the other, so I can drag and drop without switching. And if I hook up an external monitor, I can have OS X running on one and Windows on the other. And yeah, I can drag between them, like one big desktop.

What do you think?

Comments

[Matt]

I think you've been touched. :-)

Especially so if you think that two operating systems can have drivers that simultaneously share control of the same hardware. Who controls the USB bus? The FireWire bus? What if one OS tries to write something to the hard disk while the other one is writing somewhere else?

Or are you proposing that the "cube-flip animation" actually puts one OS completely to sleep, stopping all processes and releasing all hardware control? If so, where's the code that does that?

Adding an Intel chip to a Macintosh does not magically make either Mac OS X or Windows into some "client" of an undisclosed OS that mediates between the two. You will still need something like Virtual PC to emulate and arbiter hardware control, even if you don't have to emulate the processor anymore.

[Mike Fullerton]

Matt stole one of my points. :-) One of the OS's has to "own" the hardware, otherwise death and destruction and dogs and cats living together will be the result. Also what I think users want is their software to just work. None of this flipping around business. I want to run Windows Outlook right next to Entourage. I don't really care what operating system its running on and it seems to me that a lot of users won't even understand the difference. Just give me the application's I need and thats it - the rest is gravy.
-Mike

[Scott]

I was intentionally writing as a user, saying "I want". Of course, plenty of this stuff is far-fetched and likely impossible, but I still want it. You smart guy engineers get to figure out how to deliver it ;-)

-Scott

[Nicholas Riley]

I think I don't want to use Windows, and I don't want the integration to be so good that people think Windows software running on a Mac is good enough.

Of course, if Microsoft does VPC or EMC/VMware comes out with a product, or Winelib gets ported, that's fine. But making it part of the Mac OS is just a bad idea.

[M. Uli Kusterer]

Scott,

why aim so low? If you've ever used X11.app on a Mac, you know that it'll be much cooler to have the two share one screen (run rootless). Classic works similarly.

Add to that something like Virtual PC on Windows, or VMWare or so, and you'll have a much better setup. Windows apps will just run in a compatibility box on OS X. The advantage? You get Apple's network stack and stability.

Cube animation, proxies ... bah! Stop thinking like a programmer :-p I want Windows apps to "just work".

That said, I'm a little worried that once Macs run Windows apps seamlessly, the market for native Mac ports of some kinds of apps will completely evaporate. Remember OS/2, which ran Windows apps natively and thus failed to gain much momentum in having native apps ported.

But yeah, I'm after all those cool games, too, so that's how I'd want things to work, too.