Someone installed Windows Phone on a MacBook, because of course they did

What you need to know

• A new video uploaded to YouTube showcases Windows 10 Mobile running on an old MacBook.
• The YouTuber says he was able to achieve this “after a bit of experimenting.”
• The video shows just how adaptive many of Windows’ UWP apps were back in the day. 
• No, there is no practical use for this. It’s just fun!

We’re still not over the death of Windows Phone here at Windows Central, and frankly, we probably never will be. That’s why, when someone decides to try out something new with the now outdated Windows Phone OS, we’re there to cheer them on. This week, a YouTuber by the name of Nobel Tech figured out a way to install Windows 10 Mobile onto an old MacBook.

In the brief video, we see the YouTuber power on the Mac, select the Windows Phone OS from Apple’s Bootcamp menu, and boot right into the classic Windows Phone Start Screen. The video doesn’t detail the process for installing the OS onto a Mac, but does showcase how the OS runs and scales on a laptop-sized display. 

Sadly, it doesn’t look like most drivers are working. There doesn’t appear to be any graphics acceleration or Wi-Fi drivers, with only basic keyboard and mouse input working. It would probably take a lot of work to get old MacBook drivers to function correctly on the locked down Windows Phone OS.

The biggest takeaway from the video is just how well Microsoft’s UWP apps scale across different screen sizes. Keep in mind, all the apps seen running in the video were designed for a phone, yet many of them scale incredibly well on the MacBook’s 13-inch display. That’s because UWP was an adaptive app platform, which supported a UI framework that let developers easily scale a UI for large and small displays.

Unfortunately, these days Microsoft is only interested in desktop app development, as it no longer has a mobile platform to care for. Because of this most modern Windows apps no longer feature interfaces that easily scale down to a phone sized screen, as Windows apps don’t run on phones anymore.

Of course, you’d never really want to run Windows Phone on a laptop even when it was fully supported, as the Windows Phone OS was much more locked down compared to Windows 10. Still, it’s always interesting to see an OS running on hardware it was never intended for, especially when aspects of that OS function so well on them.