NEWS: Virtualization app VMWare for Mac to debut at WWDC
by The EditorIn big news for the Mac community, InfoWorld’s Tom Yager reports that VMWare, maker of virtualization applications for the Windows and Linux platforms, is to release an Intel Mac version at Apple’s World Wide Web Developer’s Conference, which begins on August 7th.
VMWare will be launching a product on the opening day of Apple’s Worldwide Developers Conference. The specific product is a secret, but the folks at VMWare were mightily torqued by my Parallels Desktop review’s unchallenged reference to Parallels’ claim of a hypervisor approach. That’s a debate for another day; probably tomorrow in a phone call with VMWare. But VMWare’s efforts to make sure I come to WWDC with a firm understanding of what a hypervisor is and is not takes some of the mystery out of the Monday announcement.
Parallels probably got wind of this before I did. They hurried to update me on enhancements planned for its Mac products “before the end of the year,” including support for USB 2.0 and the ACPI BIOS that Vista requires. VMWare is undoubtedly going to show Vista running as a guest under Tiger. That could be really interesting if VMWare’s engineers worked out the graphics driver bottleneck that slows down guests’ GUIs. Parallels might just be making sure they have something fresh out there to avoid getting buried by a VMWare PR onslaught. Or it might know some specifics of VMWare’s coming product, in which case we’ve been tipped on two more features VMWare may include in its first trip to the Mac
