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Apple users won't care but Windows users like me who need Windows for Work and want to use OSX for personal needs is very atractive.

Quoting SlackerJack:
"I'd take Windows, narf2006 and shove it where the sun dont shine."

that sais it all! ^^

"Could be possible for vendors to sell Apple laptos preloaded with OSX and Windows?"

You would have to be an Apple Value Added Reseller to get away with it. Somewhat like Terrasoft Solution pre-loading their Yellow Dog Linux.

2: I would keep a couple of bootable copies/configs on external hard drives to play games, autocad and such XP only software.

As cool as it sounds, i never heard of anyone booting Windows from external Hd.........hope i am wrong

Windows has some great games that aren't available on Mac, and the Macs (particularly the MacBook Pro and iMac) have the graphical oomph to run them. The lack of games support has historically been one of the major factors in preventing greater Mac adoption and/or switchover.

Edited 2006-03-16 20:03

Nevertheless, as many people has posted before me, what for buy a Mac and install XP afterwords ?!

Heck, why not? Some people still need Windows for various odds & ends, but may prefer to work in OSX most of the time. Depending on how CPU-intensive the apps are (such as games), I'm not sure how feasable a virtual machine is.

Linux is monopoly in nothing....sorry

Nothing to be sorry for. The whole concept of free software is anti-monopoly.

you are hillarious... Apple is not a monopoly... they develop a product... that is it.

Apple is the only company making computers that are designed to run OS X, therefore they have a monopoly on making and selling computers designed to run OS X.

http://www.google.ca/search?hl=en&q=define%3Amonopoly&btnG=Goog...
(economics) a market in which there are many buyers but only one seller; "a monopoly on silver"; "when you have a monopoly you can ask any price you like"

The quotes were copied from the Google results, they are not my own (especially the second one ;-) ).

Apple is the only company making computers that are designed to run OS X, therefore they have a monopoly on making and selling computers designed to run OS X.

Sure - if you narrow down your definition then it would be a monopoly - but OS X is not by itself a market. OS in general is a market. Macs is not by itself a market on its own either. Personal computers in general are.

By your definition, anything under the sun is a monopoly. Your point about OS X being a monopoly is saying that a Audi A4 is a monopoly b/c Audi is the only ones selling an A4. Your point is kind of absurd.

Sure - if you narrow down your definition then it would be a monopoly - but OS X is not by itself a market. OS in general is a market. Macs is not by itself a market on its own either. Personal computers in general are. By your definition, anything under the sun is a monopoly.

His definition is similar to the one the DOJ used to claim MS had a monopoly with Windows. They narrowed the market specifically to x86-compatible client OSes instead of "OS in general" as a market.

And how much difference would it have to made to have included PPC? MS would have still been considered a monopoly, still had 90% or more marketshare. I don't understand why people always bring up this argument or how could they possibly NOT consider MS a monopoly. And even if a person didn't consider that kind of marketshare a monopoly, they would still be hard pressed to ignore the facts to how MS used that leverage against the OEMs and others in a manner which nobody could consider fair business tactics. And even if a person ignored all that, they'd be even harder pressed to explain how a monopoly is good for the consumer and how choice is a bad thing.

There, now the argument has went the distance.

And how much difference would it have to made to have included PPC? MS would have still been considered a monopoly, still had 90% or more marketshare.

If they had included other architectures and especially as the OP put it, OSes in general, as the market, they wouldn't have been able to make the assertion. Narrowing it down to only x86 client OSes made it easier for them to exclude MacOS, Linux, BSD, and other OSes that either were not x86 compatible at the time, or were seen as mostly server OSes. Fast-forward to today and suddenly you have most vendors on x86 and producing OSes clearly targeted at the client.

But that's just it. You include all the desktop OSes including OS X, add them up and what you have got? Still a miniscule amount. Unless adding all these up would drop MS below significantly (and it wouldn't), it still wouldn't make any difference.

"n. a business or inter-related group of businesses which controls so much of the production or sale of a product or kind of product as to control the market, including prices and distribution."

Does that not describe Microsoft?

http://dictionary.law.com/default2.asp?typed=monopoly&type=1&submit...

And all these people clamoring for XP to be able to run on Intel Macs because they still can't get the apps they need despite Macs having been around as long as they have. Isn't that pretty much the icing on the cake?

Edited 2006-03-16 23:15

Yea, and Honda has a monopoly because you can only put Honda's engines in their cars.

not really you can put any engine in any car. HOT RODS DUDE!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

This is the usual argument from false analogy. Another variant of it is that a notorious macophile has made in other contexts, to assert that in the case of Macs, but not in the case of Dells, there is only one thing, consisting of a computer. That is, with Macs there is a seamless blend of hardware and software and just one thing. In the case of Dells, why that is very different, there are clearly two things, a computer and an OS! Words, as someone told Alice, mean just what I want them to mean, and there's an end of it.

Fact is, the OS is sold separately from the hardware. You can go into any Apple store and buy a copy. Fact is, you can install other OSs on the hardware. There really are two products being bundled here. Note that you cannot, as a retail customer, go into a Honda store and buy an engine. And that you cannot, as a retail customer, simply install a new engine into your Honda car. I know it can be done, but not in the same way. The engines are just not available at retail in the way that OSX is. The other engines, if they are installable at all, are not installable in the way that alternatives to OSX are.

So the question is simply whether there is a market segment definable as Apple computer hardware, where the product OS that runs on it is being monopolised by Apple.

Probably.

Why the hell I would install my XP edition on another machine? What is the purpose of having two OS running on the same system, where I can do word processing, internet surfing, DVD playing, wireless access etc etc by ANY one OS of these.

Right. Unless you've applications that just work better on other platforms.

I am in the scientific community and I need to use software like Matlab, S-Plus, etc. Mac is just not the solution when it comes to some of the scientific softwares.

BS. I'm in the same "community" as you.

Run MatLab happily, use R (OSS S-PLus which is by far more used), more visualization software than I've ever seen for Windows, and my machine never crashes, no matter how bad the code I write it.

I would rather use VMWare. I don't want to have to reboot to use one lousy Winhosed app. I usually keep things open all the time and I don't want to close junk down.

Photoshop only runs under Rosetta this year, sorry.

I want to see photoshop filters run on Mac and Win on the same hardware.

Well, that would be a fair (and fairly interesting) comparison as soon as Adobe makes a MacIntel version of Photoshop. The only way to run PS CS2 on a MacIntel right now is using Rosetta (PPC emulation). Adobe said that CS2 won't be ported, instead they are going to ship CS3 with support for the three platforms (WinTel/MacIntel/MacPPC)

Exactly.

Us Mac users can try and be smug and say that the only platform we will ever need is our Macs, and to a large extent that is true, just like the Linux guys who do the same and so on.

But how cool is this, now there are not too many reasons technically right now not to buy a Mac. You can boot whatever OS you like, so you will never feel "locked" in to one vendor anymore (though Linux (and various others) has been on the Mac for quite some time).

You may never boot into XP (or Vista when it comes), but at least you know you can if the need ever arises. Now when I recommend the Mac platform to anyone, I can say that if all goes wrong, and they just can't use OS X, then at least other solutions exist. I have always found people who move from XP to OS X have the opposite reaction, but that is neither here nor there...

Personally (except for gamers), VMWare (when it ships) on OS X will be probably be the solution of choice I guess...

You must have missed the announcement:

http://www.bbspot.com/News/2005/06/microsoft_intel.html

I could see myself actually buying a Mini Mac just to run W2K/BeOS/Haiku alone as well as to buy a 2nd one just to run OSX alone. Rebooting to switch apps is not my favourite thing to do as I would likely have to reboot every hr or so.

Maybe someone will come out with a way to run 2 OS on dual-core Mac Minis?

That way, Windows will run on one CPU and MacOS X on the other. Performance won't be great that way but would allow switching between the two (or 3) OSes for those who need to switch apps often. Kinda like a KVM in a box.

I believe Xen and some of the other VM tools are moving in this direction.

"Maybe someone will come out with a way to run 2 OS on dual-core Mac Minis?

That way, Windows will run on one CPU and MacOS X on the other."

Emulators that run directly on the processor already exist, Qemu for example had a closed source extention which would allow it to run X86 emulation right on an X86 processor. It's still slower because the filesystem is virtual, and the rest of the hardware resources are partitioned, but it was available for Linux and meant there was a substantial speed increase.

Besides, Xen virtualization will probably work on Linux for MacTels out of the box. And Xen virtualization means you lose NOTHING on the performance side (apart from the fact that there are 2 or more OS running side by side, obviously).

"Say for a moment you buy a macbook pro, install windows xp on it, then install the flyakiteosx mac theme pack."

I tried it once out of curiosity, but I found it problematic with some of the applications I used. The uninstaller also ran into a few complications. YMMV, but I recommend caution to anyone who wants to try the flyakite OS X theme for XP.

"It would BE a mac, it would Look like a mac, it would function with whatever windows software you installed on it."

As someone who's wanted a Mac for a long time, but lives in one of those places where you could sell your kidneys and liver and still not afford one, I have looked for ways of making Windows feel more like Mac OS X. It's just not the same.

"Its funny that people are spending 2000 bux on a macbook and then installing windows on it"

I think they are dual booting, using OS X for themselves and Windows when they feel that craving to play a game or when they need to do work that requires software that isn't Mac compatible.

"you do with your dvd of osx afterwards?"

Keep it. Only rich people are going to buy a Mac and then only run windows on it. Everyone else is going to keep OS X or dual boot.

"I'm suspecting people are buying a 149.00 linspire walmart computer and installing it on that."

Those 150$ linspire boxes won't run Windows XP or Mac OS X very well at all, they only have 128 MB of ram.

>Those 150$ linspire boxes won't run Windows XP or Mac OS >X very well at all, they only have 128 MB of ram.

Yep.. but they're a decent starter machine.

Dualbooting I can see. .I think it more has to do with what people are preferring, I run flyakite and have had no issues ever with it, I like it so much when I use my standard windows interface at work I just kinda feel lost. Well, more like saddened...

But my machine is a cool and quiet sempron 3000 socket 754, in an nforce3 shuttle box... the build quality is superb. I can run any windows software so compatibility is not an issue and thanks to the dock (stardock object dock) I never have to touch the start menu, I know its not a real mac, but for the same price as a base mini I got a machine with a radeon 9550/256 meg (passively cooled) 16x dvdr and a 120 gig hd. Its near completely silent except for when the DVD is spinning up.

And yes, I know it doesn't have the unix underpinnings, but it connects to the 360 as a media center host quite well.

Thank you and goodnight

"And yes, I know it doesn't have the unix underpinnings, but it connects to the 360 as a media center host quite well."

My Mac Mini connects to my 360 as a media center host quite well too...

Nullriver have done a neat product called Connect360 which works a treat:-
http://www.nullriver.com/index/products/connect360

I see people are downrating him, but its a very amusing idea - you buy your mac, you put XP on it, then on the XP you put a mac skin....what do you have exactly? Don't take it so seriously!