You can be sure that BIOS gurus annd that little company that does all the actual boot rom work for AMI etal, you know, the FORTH development shop that writes bootloaders for everybody????

They’re on it. And it’s no big thing. Im an old firmware man.

DUAL BOOT. I have to use Windows all day at work, but prefer Apple software for everything else. I want an Apple Laptop for both. My college kids have PowerBooks and use them 12+ hours a day. I love those things and want to use one at work.

Apple — this is your path into Dell, IBM, and HP’s hardware market share!

Dualing booting my several computers between Linux, Solaris, and WinXP has never been a problem. I share files and work between them seamlessly. You just have to have a good boot commander keeping things straight. At any rate, running XP and Vista natively will be an absolute killer on MAC hardware. But as for the laptop form factor sometime in the near future people will tire of the silver “powerbook” look and wish for other physical packages to be mobile with. But by then OSX will have gotten far more traction among users and the next step for Apple is to license OSX for the open Intel hardware market.

It is hard for me to conceive that there are a lot of folks out there who would not be interested in running OSX for a lot of things like media apps and even office apps once they play with it. Who can’t use widgets, for example? Why bother with computers at all if you can’t get lots of productive functionality and enhanced user experience out of it, and OSX is more functional that XP, even though I use XP far more at the moment than MAC in business. I just think we are on the brink of seeing Microsoft start a long slide down unless Jobs and company get too cockey.

I agree with James; Apple would make some great headway in the market if they took the step to dual-boot their Intels. I have always been fond of the Mac OS and would most likely be one of the first to buy a MacBook if it was in fact dual bootable. The only thing that has held me back from buying an Apple is the inability to run a Windows OS on it as well.

I think VMWare on MacOSX/Intel would be fantastic. I’ve found a couple of rumours that its in the works, but no word from the EMC folks. MS hasn’t even announced a date as to when they will support Virtual PC on MacOSX/Intel.

I disagree, based on many experiences with dual-boot systems. Dual-booting sounds good in theory, but in practice it’s too much of a pain to be useful unless you’re really desparate. You *really* don’t want to have to close all your files and shut down one system and boot up another every time you want to use a program for a different OS.

The real win is from programs like VMWare or WINE, which will let users run programs from both operating systems simultaneously. That’s a dual-use system that’s actually useful, and it will happen with or without Apple’s blessing.

(The one definite advantage of booting Windows on a MacBook would be for users who like Apple hardware but aren’t interested in Mac OS X.)