Cringely Sticks to Windows Apps in Mac OS X Prediction

· by · News

In his "I, Cringely" column at pbs.org on Friday, Robert X. Cringely has reiterated his belief that Apple is working on a mechanism to allow Windows applications to run natively within Mac OS X.

Amongst his predictions for 2008, Mr. Cringely said, "Apple will build into some Macs support for the Windows API, allowing Mac and Windows apps to run side by side with no need for virtualization software except to run Linux. This fits with Appleis surprising new role as a competitor to HP and Dell for the business workstation market. But whatis REALLY surprising about this is it will all be with the permission of Microsoft, which will still get a license fee from Apple, though in this case it is for just licensing the API and promising not to keep any of the APIs secret."

Other sites have previously suggested that because code was found in Leopard that loads PE files and requests Windows DLL files that the ground work for this technology is being laid by Apple.

Recently, Daniel Dilger at Roughly Drafted weighed in on this scenario , the old Red Box system, and concluded that there would be severe technical issues related to such technology. After all, Apple had its work cut out delivering the Blue Box (Classic) in Mac OS X, and it owned both of those technologies. Moreover, Mr. Dilger suggested that Apple would be loathe to upset Parallels and VMware.

TMO contacted Mr. Cringely who said that he has independent evidence that allows him to stick to this prediction. At this point, only time will tell.

John Martellaro

John Martellaro

John Martellaro was born at an early age and began writing about computers soon after that. He is a former U.S. Air Force officer and has worked for NASA, White Sands Missile Range, Lockheed Martin Astronautics, the Oak Ridge National Laboratory and Apple. At Apple he worked as a Senior Marketing Manager, a Federal Account Executive and a High Performance Computing manager. His interests include skiing, chess, science fiction and astronomy. You can follow John on Twitter at twitter.com/jmartellaro.

Sign Up for the Newsletter

Enter a valid email address

Join the TMO Express Daily Newsletter to get the latest Mac headlines in your e-mail every weekday.

Adding to list…

No Comments

Add your comment

Commenting is not available in this channel entry.