The Mac OS X operating system has been pre-installed on all MacBooks Pros since release, starting with version 10.4.4 (Tiger).[1] Along with OS X, iLife has also shipped with all systems, beginning with iLife '06.[1]

The MacBook Pro comes with the BIOS successor, Extensible Firmware Interface (EFI) 1.1. EFI handles booting differently from conventional BIOS-based computers,[59] but provides BIOS backwards compatibility, allowing dual and triple boot configurations. In addition to Mac OS X, the Microsoft Windows operating system is installable on Intel x86-based Apple computers. Officially, this is limited to both 32-bit and 64-bit versions of Windows XP, Vista, and 7, with the necessary hardware drivers included with the Boot Camp software.[55][60] Other x86 operating systems such as Linux are also unofficially supported.[61] This is made possible by the presence of the Intel architecture as provided by the CPU and the BIOS emulation Apple has provided on top of EFI.[62][63]

[edit]Compatibility

  • PowerPC emulation: As the MacBook Pro uses a different hardware platform than earlier PowerPC (PPC)-based Macintoshes, it is incapable of running PPC applications natively. It instead uses the Rosetta emulator to seamlessly run PPC applications, though at some performance penalty. Due to the manner in which Apple chose to implement it, Rosetta is incapable of emulating some lower level PPC code, and does not support 64-bit (G5 specific) PPC features.[64]
  • Classic emulation: Intel-based Macs do not support Mac OS X's Classic emulation environment (Mac OS 9 and earlier), although third-party emulators such as SheepShaver may allow these applications to run.[65][66]