Honestly, no, the intel Ibooks won't be able to run any windows software out of the box that hasn't already been ported to OSX, and I'd be speculating to say that the darwine projects, wine, crossover office, or transgaming's cedega products will allow you to use windows native software. It is highly probable that there will be excellent, almost native, performance from software emulators, but I"m purely speculating. Microsoft just made an official announcement on march 10th that windows Vista will never support efi, the boot system that the new intel macs and other cutting edge systems use, on a 32 bit processor, which is the intel processor in the new macs. WinXP is a complete no-go at this point. Win2003 server supposedly supports efi booting, but I have no experience with it. I'm planning on no windows other than through emulation on my mac laptop ever. That doesn't mean dual booting is out of the question, but some very smart folks are going to have to fiddle around with the parts and see what they can make work. I personally will be able to get by with protools running, as soon as it gets released in may or so, along with a pile of unix/linux compatible open source applications, and a few commercial app's I can't live without. I'm going to give you a link to a small, portable laptop windows, with a decent graphic's chipset, and some other good features. It's a 3880 sager laptop, sold on
Invalid Link Removed, it's got a game capable graphics processor, and decent enough parts to be a replacement for a desktop, but small and light enough to work as a laptop should, not like some giant 1 hour battery life dell or alienware beast. Sager is the company that builds alienware's uber laptops, check it out. It's about 1300 bucks, but the parts are decent enough, and you can modify a few things here and there. You'll need to make sure that the intel chipset on the motherboard is digidesign compatible, and I think it is, but verify that first and formost if your planning on buying and mbox2, no matter which laptop you choose. If you want to have maximum game compatibility, I wouldn't choose an Apple, I only play world of warcraft, and will probably get a few other games, like UT2k4, Quake4, Call Of Duty 2, ect, and will use the laptop for scientific and math open source software, unix networking applications, word processing, compiling software, and a few other tasks. Another issue I am going to make an assumption about is that because of the similar architectures between peecee's and mac's now, there should be more software we'll start seeing for macs. In theory anyways, course, I had hoped the same thing for linux, but mac's probably have a larger desktop user base than linux, whereas linux machine statistics are probably more servers. Everyone knows the money for software is in development for the masses of regular users and not specialty markets, i.e. server applications. When/if emulation is available for games, i'll start checking it out, but i'm definitely not crossing my fingers. If you are still interested in the intel based ibooks, if they are going to come out soon, they should be announced at the beginning of april fyi. The current ppc ibooks are a great deal, and are completely compatible with protools/mbox2 right now. Good luck. One last thing,
http://www.notebookreview.com lists a pile of forums with information about different laptops posted by all sorts of experts to crackpots, kinda like talkbass. Read up on the model your considering to ensure maximum enjoyment, don't be a blind consumer.
