The Virtualization of OS X
February 15th, 2007I just received a comment on my previous post about Apple’s unfair attitude - disallowing running OS X as a virtual machine, while happily supporting and encouraging the use of Windows on Macs through Parallels and Bootcamp (which might be a bundled feature for the next big OS X release, Leopard).
The prevention of virtualization of OS X has different reasons, in my opinion. The OS has been optimized to run on Apple hardware, which is a tiny subset of computer hardware that Windows has to be able to recognize. If OS X is opened for virtual machines, Apple will have to inadvertently provide support for hardware that they do not make. This is extra effort with no real benefit for them. In fact, it quite possibly would adversely effect Macintosh sales - this is not something Apple would appreciate, especially when they are trying to increase market share with their switcher campaign.
Supporting Windows on the Mac, on the other hand, is a big plus because a significant section of people cite one or more Windows-only applications as their reason to not consider a Mac. Providing this support takes away from that argument and makes the Mac an attractive option.
Apple is careful to project themselves as an experience provider (as opposed to a software vendor) while making the claim that OS X is the world’s most advanced operating system. The concept here is that with Apple, everything ‘just works’. That may not necessarily be true once you have a virtual system with a whole new hardware ecosystem. Microsoft has been battling that for years - hardware vendors’ lack of updated driver support for example, can fuel the angst toward Windows even when Microsoft is not the real culprit. By locking in to a known hardware configuration, Apple can manage to sell a premium computational device that concentrates on usability like no one else does.
