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Remember when running windows on Macs was absolutely magical?

TSE

TSE

macrumors 601
Original poster
Who remembers the days of 2006 when the Core Duo MacBooks came out? Those would get so hot you could fry an egg at the bottom of them. I remember the first time installing Boot Camp beta and installing and running Windows XP... going to my school and playing Age of Empires on it like a pro for the first time. I think I was the Spanish because I loved running around the maps and merking helpless enemy villagers as a Conquistador. Then when my friends with their gigantic Pentium 4 laptops asked me how I was doing that I would be like," doing what?", exit the game, going to the desktop of XP with those giant rolling hills, and booting EverQuest to go kill some dragons. They were speechless.

Those first Intel Macs felt so magical, man. Felt like Apple unlocked a gigantic whole new world. Gen Z kids take it for granted - if you had a Mac, you either had to get a secondary PC, get Mac equivalent software like the Office suite or the games that were recompiled to run on Mac that was never as good, or you just toughed it out while your PC friends were laughing at you for not being able to do things on your computer - and they had a strong point.

But Intel changed all that. The fastest PC laptop in the world at one point was a MacBook Pro.

Let's all show our appreciation for early intel macs and the gamechanger that running Windows was on them. Share your favorite memories and thoughts!
 
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TSE said:
Who remembers the days of 2006 when the Core Duo MacBooks came out? Those would get so hot you could fry an egg at the bottom of them. I remember the first time installing Boot Camp beta and installing and running Windows XP... going to my school and playing Age of Empires on it like a pro for the first time. I think I was the Spanish because I loved running around the maps and merking helpless enemy villagers as a Conquistador. Then when my friends with their gigantic Pentium 4 laptops asked me how I was doing that I would be like," doing what?", exit the game, going to the desktop of XP with those giant rolling hills, and booting EverQuest to go kill some dragons. They were speechless.

Those first Intel Macs felt so magical, man. Felt like Apple unlocked a gigantic whole new world. Gen Z kids take it for granted - if you had a Mac, you either had to get a secondary PC, get Mac equivalent software like the Office suite or the games that were recompiled to run on Mac that was never as good, or you just toughed it out while your PC friends were laughing at you for not being able to do things on your computer - and they had a strong point.

But Intel changed all that. The fastest PC laptop in the world at one point was a MacBook Pro.

Let's all show our appreciation for early intel macs and the gamechanger that running Windows was on them. Share your favorite memories and thoughts!
Click to expand...
You were still playing EverQuest in 2006?
 
Quote St Ignatius W Gates: 😱

'Give a child Windows till he is seven years old, and I will show you the man.'

Quote on Steve Jobs:
'...the only problem with Microsoft is that they "have absolutely no taste". He elaborated that they did not think of original ideas, brought no culture into their products, and created "third-rate products".' 😃
 
Oh yes.. I also remember the pre-Boot Camp Intel-Mac period when there was a big race to get Windows XP running on an Intel Mac natively!
Shortly after Apple introduced Boot Camp and changed the way we use our Macs hugely.
(FWIW, it was also fun to get Mac OS X 10.4 for Intel-Macs running on a Pentium 4)...

My Mac Pro 2008 (lovely Mac, one of the best Macs ever price-performance considered) with upgraded grfx Radeon 5870 would triple boot into Mac OS X, Windows XP and Windows 7. Even installed a Soundblaster X-Fi PCIe card in there to get true 5.1 surround sound support in Windows.

That Mac could "do it all":
  • Run Mac OS X and iLife / iWork / FCP apps perfectly
  • Run Windows XP / 7 perfectly to fit gaming needs
  • Just plain ol' fun to play around with.
I love my Mac Studio M4 Max I have now.... but, but do I miss being able to "do it all". No Windows for gaming anymore.... got an old iMac 2017 i7 / Radeon 580 Pro for that.

To me the early Intel-Mac era was probably the most fun and exciting time to use and hobby around with Macs.
 
I was very skeptical of the Intel switch. I was a diehard believer in PowerPC and the advantages of RISC vs CISC chips. Spent my fair share of time advocating for the superiority of Mac OS X and Apple's hardware. The last thing I wanted was to watch PowerBooks get Pentium M chips and Intel Inside stickers on the palm rests. Even the name switch sounded stupid to me. But I got a MacBook Pro Core Duo in May of 2006 and was immediately amazed that my laptop had dual CPU cores and booted up SO fast. Immediately prior to the MacBook Pro, I was daily driving a B&W G3 and Mac Mini G4 and an iBook G3. All computers that had felt great until realizing the power of the Core Duo. All that said, I never had a PC, never invested in Windows software, or was much of a gamer. I never did Bootcamp or run Windows on my Macs. As for productivity, ever since Office 98 I never had any reservations that the Windows version of Office was any better. Office 2001 was great, and even though v.X was slow, it was a true OS X app.
 
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MacsRgr8 said:
Oh yes.. I also remember the pre-Boot Camp Intel-Mac period when there was a big race to get Windows XP running on an Intel Mac natively!
Click to expand...
Ah yes, I remember the forum posts at the time. "Help, I tried to install Windows and now my Mac just gives a flashing cursor and won't do anything". I remember wondering whether Boot Camp was conceived as a way of reducing support costs from people hosing their bootloaders.
 
Hrududu said:
I was very skeptical of the Intel switch. I was a diehard believer in PowerPC and the advantages of RISC vs CISC chips….
Click to expand...
Up until the G3 days, I was also very much advocating the speed and efficiency of the RISC chips, adoring the original iMac and my Blue & White G3.

That did diminish when Motorola was struggling with the “Mhz-race” and simply couldn’t get the G4 above 500 MHz, when the Pentium 4 was racing towards 2 GHz….
I know that MHz isn’t everything… but Apple introducing the “MHz-myth” and Steve even “demonstrating” on stage that a Dual 500 MHz G4 was faster than a 2 GHz Intel PC in one specific Photoshop filter….. that showed that Apple also was very much trying to hide the problems with the G4 specifically (remember the Front Side Bus speed issue as well)…. It was losing big-time performance-wise.
Enter G5. Awesome speed! But the power needed…. And still no 3 GHz, and Intel was racing towards 4 GHz.

Loving PowerPC during G4 / G5 era was IMHO really rooting for the under-dog. Swicthing to Intel was switching to the winning team.
 
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I had XP on my Core 2 Duo Macbook 2007. I used to joke to my friends that the only times I had issues and had to reinstall my whole Macbook was when something happened with the Windows partition.

But it was great, had lots of games I could play on it, even though I later preferred to use Crossover instead.
 
So in the Apple Silicon Era, who is running Windows 10/11 virtualised, what is your experience, and use case.
 
Madonepro said:
So in the Apple Silicon Era, who is running Windows 10/11 virtualised, what is your experience, and use case.
Click to expand...
The use-cases I am aware of is that you either need to use a specific Windows only application (or want to play an older game) or need to test a Windows application but you do not need the raw hardware power of a dedicated PC.
A family member uses Parallels with Windows 11 on an iMac M1 (16 GB RAM) and the performance is “fine” as the application used on Windows is an old game of which there is no good alternative on macOS native.
 
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Madonepro said:
So in the Apple Silicon Era, who is running Windows 10/11 virtualised, what is your experience, and use case.
Click to expand...
Since no ARM version of Windows 10, it will require x86 emulation, not virtualization. Big difference. Current state of x86 emulation on Apple Silicon, whether Parallels or UTM, is dog-slow and Windows 10 via emulation is practically unusable. Since there is ARM version of Windows 11, it is possible to run virtualized and performance is quite decent.
 
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I got my first Mac in late 2009, a 400 MHz iMac DV running Tiger. I used it daily until mid-2011 (it was quite usable still; I remember getting new Safari updates well into 2010) when I got an Early 2009 Mac mini (it classifies as an Early Intel, right?) to replace it.

Up until that point I also had a PC, a 2007 Celeron M Toshiba Satellite laptop running XP, which I used to play some games on. I remember setting up Boot Camp right after getting the mini and it was amazing. Super easy to set-up and it (the mini) ran circles around the PC.

Although I prefered (and still prefer) PowerPC Macs, the Early Intel days, especially after 2007 (the aluminum + glass era), were amazing. Apple's systems were in a completely different league.
 
Bigwaff said:
Since no ARM version of Windows 10, it will require x86 emulation, not virtualization. Big difference. Current state of x86 emulation on Apple Silicon, whether Parallels or UTM, is dog-slow and Windows 10 via emulation is practically unusable. Since there is ARM version of Windows 11, it is possible to run virtualized and performance is quite decent.
Click to expand...
I have ran Windows 11 on UTM, just out of curiosity. When I did, the experience was pitifully slow and extremely laggy. It was impossible for me to use. There were a few games I wanted to try playing in UTM, but due to how Windows 11 was, it was impossible.
 
ClaraStahlbaum said:
I have ran Windows 11 on UTM, just out of curiosity. When I did, the experience was pitifully slow and extremely laggy. It was impossible for me to use. There were a few games I wanted to try playing in UTM, but due to how Windows 11 was, it was impossible.
Click to expand...
UTM is indeed much slower than Parallels or VMware’s Fusion.
 
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