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Comment by batista | Hacker News Reader

No, in the context we are discussing, a PC is not a "personal computer", but what was called an "IBM PC compatible" (and subsequently by some a Wintel machine).

Few people use "PC" to mean personal computers in general, especially since for 99% of the people personal computers are all they know and encounter anyway, so no need to distinguish both Mac and PCs from, say, Mainframes and embedded systems....

That's why nobody got confused by the 3 year running "-I'm a Mac, -And I am a PC" ad campaign.

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I was under the impression that since Macs went over to x86, they were capable of running Windows. They are IBM PC compatible.

I think the only difference now is that Macs use EFI boot, and not BIOS boot and hence will only boot software with a EFI-boot compatible bootloader.

Once you get past that step a Mac works exactly like a "PC". Just like a "PC" works exactly like a Mac if you fake the EFI-boot via a custom BIOS-to-EFI bootloader on a USB-stick.

That was fixed with firmware updates soon after release of the first Intel Macs.

If we're going to be technical, since they don't run a PC BIOS (they use the newer EFI), they're not compatible with the original IBM PC.

EFI is not exclusive to Macs. It was developed by Intel and has been deprecated in favor of UEFI. Most UEFI images will have legacy support for BIOS services.

There is basically no difference between a modern Mac and a PC - except for Mac OS X, which can be run on "Hackintoshes".

>EFI is not exclusive to Macs.

Which is beside the pedantic point, that to be an "IBM PC compatible" you have to NOT run EFI.

Not if your (U)EFI firmware is capable of booting BIOS-booted operating systems as well as (U)EFI operating systems (like IBM System x Server Firmware).

And yet the PC clone market as a whole appears to be moving over to EFI

So they appear to be moving over to "not being IBM PC compatible". Which is perfectly valid.

I never said that PCs are called PCs because they ARE IBM PC compatible, only said they are called PCs because in the past "IBM PC compatible" defined their category.

I have a floppy drive and my PC will run some old PC games that ran bare-metal (i.e. booted off the floppy). Macs by design, can't boot those.

Also it's a bit freaky that my disk from 1987 still works in a machine I built last-year. Some games assumed a 4.77MHz clock though, and I there's no turbo button, so they don't really work :(

Technically, since they don't use a PC BIOS. Plus, the "IBM PC compatible" as a specification hasn't been important since 199x.

The PC moniker for Wintel machines, while heralding from the "IBM PC compatible" era, it's used as a designator of the category of, well, PC-derived machines now, not as a technical spec. We mostly use the word Wintel for the respective thing now.

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