There's no question that Parallels is an amazing piece of software, letting you run Windows on a Mac OS X machine. The latest version of the software even lets you drag and drop files between Windows and OS X installations.

But so far all this virtualization fun has only worked one way. You could purchase a copy of Parallels, and a copy of Windows, and install the whole thing on your Mac box. If you want to run OS X on that cheap PC you picked up at the store, you've been out of luck.

But CNN is reporting that an upcoming version will be designed in such a way "that by coincidence will make it easier to run Mac OS on a non-Apple computer." Apparently that wasn't so much the development goal as a side-effect of the way the software's designed and the fact that Intel has built virtualization into its latest chips.

Of course, this doesn't mean that Mac virtualization on a PC will be Apple-approved anytime soon. But if Parallels shows that there's user demand, I don't see why Apple wouldn't release an install CD optimized for non-Mac machines at some point.

[via Engadget]