A fun-loving guy named Nick Lee got an Apple Watch running watchOS 2 to run MacOS System 7.5.5, using the Mini vMac Macintosh emulator. Not to be outdone, someone else got Windows 7 to run on an Asus Zenphone.
A fun-loving guy named Nick Lee got an Apple Watch running watchOS 2 to run MacOS System 7.5.5, using the Mini vMac Macintosh emulator. Not to be outdone, someone else got Windows 7 to run on an Asus Zenphone.
The apple watch UI is so bad, I would consider this an improvement.
Not to be outdone, someone else got Windows 7 to run on an Asus Zenphone.
That is just running Windows guest under QEMU KVM! The article says someone “figured out” running it on the device but I am not impressed at all. That is not figuring out.
If you watch the video, it takes forever for 7.5 to boot, I remember it booted WAY quicker on my old Mac II cx which was a 30 Mhz Motorola 68030 chip (about the same as a 486) with 6 meg of ram.
Doesn’t the Apple watch have some modern Arm chip similar to an iPhone?
I thought the same thing… it’s slower than old Macs… Cool that it’s possible, but doesn’t make the watch look very impressive…
Sure it doesn’t. Go back to 1992, sitting in front of a mac running OS7, and think about all that running in your watch.
The entire watch is the size of a single component on the motherboard of that mac.
Pretty impressive to me. How fast we get jaded to technology.
Edited 2015-07-13 13:08 UTC
It’s not just about whatever CPU a device has, it’s also about how it’s used. Even if they have a nice, up-to-date ARM chip in the watch, they’ll be running it very slowly in order to get as much life out of the tiny battery as they can, so it’s never gonna be a powerhouse. And emulating a system like that needs some decent CPU grunt.
Yes, which has a completely different instruction set than any chip MacOS was ever designed to use. Therefore, the entire architecture needs to be emulated. This isn’t virtualization, but full-on CPU emulation. That requires a lot more CPU, and even high-end Intel Core I7s can be slow at this type of emulation. Judging from how under-clocked the Apple Watch has to be to get even a bit of battery life out of that tiny form factor, I’d say it’s damn amazing that MacOS runs at all.
I’m very well aware of this, I remember running DOS/Windows 3.1 on my PowerMac 6100 (60 MHz PowerPC) using the SoftWindows emulator, and whilst I can’t say it was speedy, it was certainly good enough to run AutoCAD for DOS that I used in college.
I don’t remember exactly, but I do think that Win3.1 booted up in a respectable time in SoftWindows and this was emulating x86 on a 60 MHz PowerPC.
With a bit of googling, it looks like the Apple Watch uses a 32 bit ARM7 chip, which I think is similar to the Raspberry Pi. I’ve used a Raspberry Pi with Ubuntu, and it certainly seemed pretty quick.
Edited 2015-07-10 18:06 UTC