Software and Operating Systems
The OS X operating system has been pre-installed on all MacBook Pros since release, starting with version 10.4.4 (Tiger). Along with OS X, iLife has also shipped with all systems, beginning with iLife '06.
The MacBook Pro comes with the BIOS successor, Extensible Firmware Interface (EFI) 1.1. EFI handles booting differently from conventional BIOS-based computers, but provides BIOS backwards compatibility, allowing dual and triple boot configurations. In addition to 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. Other x86 operating systems such as Linux are also unofficially supported. 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.
As the MacBook Pro uses a different hardware platform than earlier PowerPC (PPC)-based Macintoshes, versions of OS X prior to Lion can run PPC applications only via the Rosetta emulator, which exacts some performance penalty, cannot emulate some lower-level PPC code, and does not support 64-bit (G5 specific) PPC features. Rosetta is not present in Lion and later, so PPC applications cannot be run under those versions of OS X.
Read more about this topic: Mac Book Pro
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