iPod owners who’ve had occasion to plug their little musical buddies into an other-platformed computer understand the limitations of doing so. When you plug a Windows-formatted iPod into a Mac, it pretty much works. When you plug a Mac-formatted iPod into a Windows box, the PC hasn’t a clue what to do with it unless you’ve installed a utility such as Mediafour’s $30 XPlay 2.
So, what happens when you plug an iPhone into a differently-platformed computer?
As far as I can tell, it just works—no hassles.
To see how positive Windows functions behave on the iPhone I booted my Mac Pro into Boot Camp running Windows Vista Home Premium and prepared to kiss my Mac-formatted iPhone goodbye when I jacked it into the Mac running Windows. Vista did no more than install the Windows iPhone driver and tell me that it was ready, willing, and able to talk to the
In iTunes 7.3 for Windows the iPhone arised with all my input and media on it. Had I wished to I could have synced it with that version of iTunes. I didn’t care to but I was happy to know that I could have done so without having to restore the iPhone.
I’m not certain precisely what the implications of that are other than the fact that it will be far less of a pain to move an iPhone from one computer to another, regardless of the operating system that computer is running. Still, nice to know.
And considering I know you’ll ask, yes, I have tried using my iPhone with Parallels and it won’t recognize it, claiming that it’s being used by another application (and yes, I’ve quit iTunes on the Mac side and I still get the message).
Original post by Christopher Breen
