Earlier this year, Apple changed a rule that allowed emulators to be made available on the App Store on all of the best iPhones. This means that apps can mimic consoles and systems from years ago. And one YouTuber figured out how to install Windows XP on an iPhone.
Michael MJD, a brave soul on YouTube, decided to tackle this Frankensteinian challenge using the UTM SE emulator. It let him install Windows XP on his iPhone. iMore's Daryl Baxter tried something similar with his iPad back in July.
Now, in case you’re wondering why anyone would want to run a 20-year-old operating system on an iPhone, the answer is probably the same reason people try to bake cakes in air fryers – because they can. But before you get too excited about playing Minesweeper on your iPhone, there are still hoops to jump through, thanks to security concerns and a little something called piracy laws.
How you can run Windows XP on an iPhone
After wrangling with UTM SE, which, mind you, doesn’t have Just-in-Time (JIT) compilation like its older sibling, Michael managed to install Windows XP on an iPhone. But with great power comes great loading times – two hours to install, and then another 30 minutes just to boot up.
Frustrated but undeterred, Michael decided to up the ante by using AltStore to install the original UTM for better performance. And, lo and behold, things did speed up a bit – though not enough to make you forget that this is all wildly impractical.
Once Windows XP was finally chugging along, Michael installed and played Half-Life 1, an old first-person shooter on a pocket-sized touchscreen. Running Half-Life 1 wasn’t without its hiccups. There were compatibility issues, frame drops, and overall, the game ran about as smoothly as a 90s dial-up connection. But credit where it’s due, Michael managed to get it to work.
Michael then decided to install a VirtualBox on his emulated Windows XP, aiming to run Windows 98. Windows 98 did boot up, but predictably, it was a hot mess of crashes and glitches. Undeterred by the carnage, Michael attempted to go even further back in time to install Windows 95. Unfortunately, that ended in disaster as well, with the system crashing before it could fully come to life.
In the end, Michael’s experiment was a bizarre yet fascinating experiment into what you can do with iPhone emulators. If you’ve ever wondered what it would be like to turn your sleek, modern iPhone into a sluggish relic of the past, now you know. You probably won’t want to, but at least you know it’s possible.
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