When the Mactels were announced and from the early feedback from developers, many people were ashamed to see a PC-like BIOS with its limitations on Macs.
Good bye to Firewire disks boot, to the startup disk choice with option key, to the target mode...
However, everything's not lost thanks to EFI.
EFI is for Extensible Firmware Interface. Unlike current BIOS, it is a small operating system written in C and no more in assembly. Therefore, it's easier to adapt for every board manufacturer and give access to advanced functions.
On the beginning of 2006, EFI 1.1 specifications should be frozen.
Apple will thus be able to make an EFI able to do whatever does our current OpenFirmware and even more. It will be a change we won't have to undergo.
After all, the decision to change processors might have been better planed than some may have thought.
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