Everybody loved Windows XP, right? It was one of Microsoft’s best operating systems, introduced just before Windows 7, and there was nothing at all between them, because Vista didn’t exist. The operating system now and again returns to the news cycle, and this time, coming up on nine years since Microsoft ceased support for Windows XP, it’s back because some folks managed to get it running in an Apple Vision Pro dev environment.
Coming to us by way of PCMag, Turing Software, the developers of UTM, a virtual machine program that allows users to run other operating systems on Apple devices, have managed to get Windows XP to post-boot within an Apple Vision Pro testing tool.
Here’s a short demo the company put up on Twitter, showing the OS boot to the iconic ‘Bliss’ background. UTM is capable of running newer operating systems, such as Windows 10 and 11, along with various versions of Linux, but XP is definitely a cool one to see.
As the Apple Vision Pro isn’t currently available for purchase, and developers don’t have access to the headset except for development kits, virtual testing environments are necessary to make sure your programs will run on the device when it launches in 2024.
And I, for one, am glad that an operating system from 2001 will be able to run on the ~$7,000 VR headset as an internal program. Heck, all I need is Clippy in my virtual space and I’m good to go.
At the moment, UTM has only released the above teaser for Windows XP on the Apple Vision Pro, and the company has said that input devices, such as mouse and keyboard support, are still to be implemented.
But if you really wanted to know what it’d be like, you could save thousands of dollars and buy a Meta Quest 2, switch it to the PC monitor streaming mode, and boot up Windows XP through an emulator like VirtualBox or Hyper-V.
Anyway. As you were.