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.