In case you did not get tired of it yet, here are some more articles on Apple’s Boot Camp. Firstly, everybody’s favourite Microsoft zealot Microsoft user Paul Thurrot has reviewed Boot Camp: “While Boot Camp isn’t perfect, it’s still a semi-miraculous solution that lets you dual boot between Mac OS X and Windows XP on an Intel-based Mac. That, folks, is what’s known as the best of both worlds in these parts, and I’m personally very excited at the prospect of, or at the opportunity to, purchase Apple notebooks and desktops in the future.” Secondly, “while the lower barrier for Apple users to run Windows applications will lead to growth in the share of users running Apple hardware, overall the effect on Mac developers will probably be negative. The reason? In a word: competition.”
After what I have read about this, it seems like most pundits look at the whole dual boot thing with the wrong focus. The reccuring scheme is like good for users, bad for Mac and the developmet of Mac applications. They all seem to forget one important factor, developers are users too.
If you set up your developers with dual boot Macs, you suddenly get cost efficient access to another market/platform. Or the developers can use the same kind of argument to convince their management to get them those nice MacBooks.
I don’t think it will result in a explosion of new Mac application, but more like an increased trickle. Besides, it is very unlikely to cause any significant migration from Macs to Windows. It’s a well known fact that Mac users don’t switch.
For companies doing accessories needing device drivers, it makes good sense to chose Macs with dual boot.
Edited 2006-04-09 13:59
You’re forgetting one important factor: Development for a new platform takes time and money. It’s a matter of the company willing to spend those resources.
One barrier is out of the way, but for most companies, that’s not enough.
It’s a well known fact that Mac users don’t switch.
Umm…. well known by whom? That all Mac users don’t switch? Does this mean that if I use a Mac, but then decided that I like Linux/Windows/anything better, and I do switch, then I was never a Mac user because if I had be I wouldn’t have switched? Come on, get real. The rest of your post was really good, then you had to throw in that gem.
I do agree that this will be great for developers, especially those developing for the web. Finally, a way to have one computer run the three major operating systems, and switch back and forth to see how their site looks on web browsers on each. Now for vitualization, when it will become much more practical to swtich back and forth often. That’s the point when I’ll get a Mac.
Umm…. well known by whom? That all Mac users don’t switch? Does this mean that if I use a Mac, but then decided that I like Linux/Windows/anything better, and I do switch, then I was never a Mac user because if I had be I wouldn’t have switched? Come on, get real. The rest of your post was really good, then you had to throw in that gem.
I’m a little embarassed by this, but I actually switched from Windows to Linux, then from Windows to Mac (bought an eMac), then from Mac to Linux to Windows. (sold the eMac, thought I was going to run Linux on a laptop…. couldn’t find any support for it….)
Now my laptop dual boots Windows and Linux and an 20″ iMac Core Duo is on its way!
So yes, some Mac users do “switch”, but I learnt the error of my ways.
Maybe old school Mac users don’t switch, but what about the influx of Windows users wanting to run Windows XP on Mac hardware?
Mac has always had that mystical aura of being cool and the people using it seem to have it made. It might be that the new crop of users want the status symbol, but not the Win32 incompatible *Nix OS.
We both “know” that anything is better than Windows, still the majority opts to run it.
“It’s a well known fact that Mac users don’t switch.”
They do. I know a lot who have. Here’s why:
1) Price performance
2) User interface
3) Hardware quality
4) The antics of the mac fanatics
They do switch, mostly to Linux, sometimes to Windows. Its just that they never write in and say. A bit like the Church. Converts make a big noise. Leavers keep quiet and get on with their lives.
“2) User interface
3) Hardware quality”
Hey, pass me whatever you’ve been smoking eh?
Thurrott. Not the best of person to be reading this from.
Typical comments such as he believes the boot setup should be more like Windows but being a beta he’s sure it’ll get *better* later?
Gads… more like Windows boot setup couldn’t be further removed from my definition of better.
But Apple made it a reality!!
Edited 2006-04-09 15:45
The point is still that people who want to run Windows programs but are curious about Mac OS X, can still run Mac OS. If ALL they wanted to do was run Windows, I’m sure there are plenty of people who’d tell you Apple’s hardware isn’t the very top of the class. I bet people still aren’t going to buy Macintosh unless they want to try OS X.
This is intended to get people to try Mac OS X who wouldn’t otherwise be willing. Now they have a copy of Mac OS X also available. Most of this doom assumes that all developers and users are going to switch to only using Windows XP and that developing for OS X will stop.
There are people who used OS X before this was a possibility, enough to make software development feasible. I doubt they’ll all suddenly switch to Windows just because Apple made it possible, so they’re still there.
Then you have the new people who are interested in testing the waters. More copies available & more interested users = MORE market for software. Yeah, now they can run the Windows versions, but these people will probably be interested in running a Mac version if it was available. They bought an Apple, didn’t they?
A lot of them will probably decide to stay with Windows, but at least Apple sold them the hardware. Apple wins, unless OS X compares badly to Windows XP. Which it might, given application availability…
Well to me, the ONLY good point about x86 based macs was that I could retire a desktop (which needed to be done anyways either by an upgrade or…) when Apple releases the x86 powermacs, and, hopefully(and now definitely) run Windows on the same machine.
While dual booting is a possibility(as I primarily use windows for gaming seeing the pathetic and overpriced mac games market which ports only mass appeal games(and not all of those!) at varying levels of port quality(from abysmal to pretty good(Id)) I think that getting WINE going with a windows partition(to use the real deal MS libs, hopefully lessening compat problems, although I haven’t seriously looked at WINE in quite some time, and Mac ported games other than a few are usually a year behind and marketed as significantly higher prices, esp when the Windows version is in the bargain bin by that point) would be even better, i.e. no reboot required.
So, competition: well for me, I generally prefer MacOS/OSX apps to their Windows counterparts, and there are still many good util/productivity apps that come out for OSX first and then are ported to Windows if they are TRULY popular, e.g. Konfabulator(not a good example as I didn’t really care for it, but it was nifty…), Watson, etc. On top of this I can’t think of ANY apps that I use that are ONLY available on Windows or don’t have a “better” Mac counterpart in existence. The only REAL competition that I can see here, as I alluded to above would be the gaming market for OSX, and frankly, I don’t see having OSX game porters going away to be a bad thing for all the reasons listed and alluded to above.
Ah, but I have thought of another pointof the utility of running Windows on macs would be all of those nasty hacked up Windows based VPN clients. The open source/shareware support for those systems is often quite poor on non-Windows systems, unfortunately those forms of VPN are quite prevalent. (I prefer just tunneling through SSH, but, often there is no choice in the matter.) Another case would be if for some reason you had to use .NET. While mono is pretty decent and they do seem to be making headway on windows.forms, I doubt that they’ll a) be able to keep up with MS or b) be truly compatible enough to do serious work, so at least now if forced to work with .NET development or apps we can do it with the real deal. (I still prefer Java as it’s ubiquitous, and I really don’t see any real advantages with .NET.)
Might’ve missed a few other items, but this pretty well sums up my opinion on the whole x86 mac and running windows on x86 mac thing. I’m still going to miss power based arch and long battery life notebooks though, but I’ll get over it eventually, and hope that some fuel cell systems and higher cap batteries become available/common. (I get about 4h of battery life on a 1G upgraded pismo running moderate loads and wifi(probably should’ve been longer but proc cycling disappeared…only to reappear recently, and now I need a new battery), whereas the macbooks are looking to be in at about 2.5-3.5h under similar conditions… I used to get ~5.5h on a G3/300 ibook as well… OS9/processor cycling/wifi/1st gen rev b board)
Get rid of Mac porting houses?
Unless companies start making Mac native versions themselves (like id and Epic do for Linux versions) we need these guys around.
I don’t want to deal with buggy ass WINE issues, or have to dual boot when there would have been a native solution. The only reason I boot Windows on my Mac is for Half-Life 2 and Sin Episodes – both which I know will never hit Mac. Quake 4, Doom 3 etc I get the Mac version, I don’t LIKE rebooting, and I definitely preefer the native port even if it takes someone like Macsoft Games or Aspyr to do it. Hopefully Intel hardware will eventually cut down port times once PPC machines are all legacy.
From my understanding Boot Camp is the first step to a greater picture. I believe Apple with the release of Mac OS 10.5 leopard will run windows apps directly from OS X. There is software already out there that does this now.
http://www.kberg.ch/q/
http://www.parallels.com/en/products/workstation/mac/
This looks good as well.
ok,let me clarify my original post:
The only time that I use windows is to play games. Why? Mac porting houses are entirely incapable of providing consistent and timely mac ports of games, and tend to only port crappy games that sold well(and were easily portable) to the mac.
Changing to x86 architecture will NOT drastically affect port times, unles the porters were entirely incompetent to begin with(which I wouldn’t doubt).
Lemme know when Half Life 2 and Oblivion get ported to OSX, eh? maybe Half Life while you’re at it. (Hell that’s ones already done, just release it!)
Oh, and I don’t enjoy paying the mac port tax either. I can;t think of a single game where the mac version made me feel extra specially happy to pay $60 for when the windows version was already $20.
Thurrott says in the article that he bought a top-of-the-line iMac for 2 grand and then sold it when he couldn’t run Windows on it. Huh? Did he have a sudden attack of White Plastic Fetish-itis? He sounds a wee bit DUMB to me.
And installing Windows on Mac strikes me as just a trendy, expensive way to screw up your Mac.
I am sure that people who are installing Windows missed out on that brilliant thought of your last sentence in your post. I have used XP for as long time and I have yet had it screw up any of my 4-5 computers that I have owned.
As a programmer/developer I can see so many people finding this feature useful! Heck as a gamer as well I can see this feature useful! Simple do all your work on OS X but do your play on Windows! It is a brilliant solution in my opinion and Apple is going to cash in! There are so many people out there I bet who want the Apple hardware but are not comfortable giving up Windows, and they will buy Apple hardware and maybe even try out the OS X installed on it, like it and decided to keep it and not install Windows on it! Apple wins!
I think this is great because for too long MS has had the OS market to itself despite the brilliant strides coming from the Linux and the Unix camps. I am hopeful the OS X marketshare goes up and this causes MS to sit up and take notice. There is nothing better than aggressive competition to drive prices down and put cutting edge technology in the hands of the end user.
What Mac users really want is not a dual-boot Windows/OSX option but a real virtualization OS architecture. There are betas out there already but they are not stable yet. Now that Linux/OSX/Windows has code to support Intel architecture it should be possible to run each OS in a separate desktop Window or as Gnome linux people call it a “Desktop Workspace Switcher” using virtualization systems such as Zen. Very cool developments lately in virtualization.
Hardware virtualization is coming. Inside a year. Have a partition for Windows that can change size on a dime, run it along-side OS X, and…bliss (then, of course, some Debian variant next to that
).
The harwdare support will make it truly viable for the desktop, because only one OS, in theory, will need to ‘know’ about the virtualization. It probably won’t be as simple as it should be, but it should be easy enough that even your typical Mac User can handle it w/o issues.
The harwdare support will make it truly viable for the desktop, because only one OS, in theory, will need to ‘know’ about the virtualization. It probably won’t be as simple as it should be, but it should be easy enough that even your typical Mac User can handle it w/o issues.
Funny thing is, your “typical” Mac User has been historically way more knowledgeable of his operating system than the typical Windows user.
Back in the System 7/Mac OS 8/9 days, the average Mac User would be able to troubleshoot extension conflicts either by hand or by aid of some early loading utility like Conflict Catcher, and they knew about rebuilding the desktop file and they even ran Speed Disk every once in a while. Whereas the average Windows user is still baffled by DLL hell, not to mention the plague of the day, spyware.
Nowadays the security model and user-local “Libraries” makes screwing Mac OS such a non-issue that seasoned Mac Users are buying their relatives Macintoshes so they have a trouble-free (well, almost) computing experience.
Think four times before assuming the average Mac User is Mom and Pop from the grocery store.
“Funny thing is, your “typical” Mac User has been historically way more knowledgeable of his operating system than the typical Windows user.”
OK…that has nothing to do with it. The interface required to swap between OSes, and give OSes power over the system are what matter. This is what Apple is better at than others.
“Think four times before assuming the average Mac User is Mom and Pop from the grocery store.”
Think four times before you assume I assume that. I assume they are intelligent liberal arts folks who get annoyed at Windows bugging them about shit, which it does.
Another x Mac user calling in and an x Mac developer too.
The point Thurrot makes about Mac developers having to look over their shoulders at comparable software on Windows for prices is interesting. While Windows often has what seems like 100s of choices for each application, I suspect the $ cake is very unevenly cut so that 90% of it goes to maybe 10% of the developers with the household names raking most of it in. On the Mac side I suspect the case is the same as it was 20yrs ago, fewer duplicate apps but more even division except for the MS, Adobe parts of it.
If I were a Mac developer today for OS X I don’t think I would be too concerned about boot camp causing loss of OS X apps, in fact I might see plenty of opportunities aimed specifically at the new Windows user to create apps that are now mostly on Windows and bring something better to OS X if it hasn’t already been done. Mac apps have always been about quality, & consistancy and when Mac apps get ported back to Windows, they almost always define the standard, lots of examples there.
Kind of off-topic but I dont know if this is true…and if it is, then yuck!
http://www.theinquirer.net/?article=30869
And just another article to get rid of Steve Job’s reality distortion field:
http://www.theinquirer.net/?article=30870
So if Apple is a hardware company, I fail to see how they advertise they have superior hardware…I think they are a software company after all because OS X would be the only reason to get a Mac!
Maybe old school Mac users don’t switch, but what about the influx of Windows users wanting to run Windows XP on Mac hardware?
The don’t switch comment was made a little tongue in cheek, but anyone having had the “pleasure” of discussing computers with Macheads should get the point.
As for your Windows users wanting to run Windows XP on Mac hardware, they don’t make any difference when it comes to the addoption of Mac software since they will continue use Windows(Some potential switchers maybe). They will not increase the user base, or decrease it for that matter making them rather irrelevant from that point of view.
They will of course help Apples increase revenue, and with Apple being a hardware company they will not mind one bit. If some people spend extra cash to buy Windows to use on their Macs just to be cool, Apple could care less.
To be a little cynical, I actually think the Boot Camp thing has been in the plans at Apple nearly from the time they decided to go for Intel chips. The reasons for it not to be unveiled before now was mostly to generate and measure the interest, and have the comunity work up the “must have” mode. The timing is rather suspicious. Suddenly out of the blue right after(what is it now, 2 or 3 weeks?) the first report of successful hacks to achieve this hits the net, they announce the product.
From my understanding Boot Camp is the first step to a greater picture. I believe Apple with the release of Mac OS 10.5 leopard will run windows apps directly from OS X. There is software already out there that does this now.
http://www.kberg.ch/q/
I cannot really understand why people want some software that enables them to run windows apps inside OSX. All that will cause is to really stop developers from making apps for OSX. Why make an app for OSX when you can make one for Windows that also work on OSX? It’s OS2 – Windows dilemma all over.
I cannot really understand why people want some software that enables them to run windows apps inside OSX. All that will cause is to really stop developers from making apps for OSX. Why make an app for OSX when you can make one for Windows that also work on OSX? It’s OS2 – Windows dilemma all over.
The fundamental difference is that IBM never arm-locked OEMs into OS/2, and to be honest, before Windows 95, I myself considered buying OS/2; however non-existant to shady Win32 compatibility signed the system’s slow death.
This time, however, Mac OS X will be bundled with the hardware no matter what. The software is the soul of Mac OS, and NeXTStep for the matter. Steve Jobs doesn’t give a rat’s ass about the hardware as long as it runs the elegant (by his definition of elegant) software from his company.
Boot Camp making those Macs Windows-compatible is just cash cow. And boy did it work, because in the shortest period ever (literally a couple days) Apple shares rose almost 20%. I guess it will fall rather quickly because if I owned a few shares I’d sell them right now to make some money. And buy again as soon as it reaches 5% within the previous level.
The shareholders’ smile oughta have been so wide they risked severing the top of their heads from their jaws
Fearing that developers will stop making applications for OS X because they can just ask you to boot in Windows (or use virtualization) is like expecting developers to have limited themselves to classic (OS 9) apps instead of going native all this years.
Once a new user gets a mac and realizes that all but a couple of apps have either a native OS X port or a better alternative, the race for developers to build native replacements for those XP apps starts, just as in the OS 9 to OS X transition.
Everyone wanted to become “classic free”, and developers who responded to that demand benefited. The same will happen with people trying to become “windows free”.
Here is a nice article about this:
http://daringfireball.net/2006/04/windows_the_new_classic
Edited 2006-04-09 19:39
This is the reason for “Boot Camp”
See the picture here.
http://forum.osx86project.org/index.php?act=Attach&type=post&id=221…
For those hard of seeing, that’s Vista running on a iMacTel.
I just got back from CompUSA, every MacBook Pro they had was sitting there at a Windows XP desktop.
This is already a bad thing for the Mac Platform as we know it.
I really fail to understand how can this ever be bad for apple.
From my point of view, i always wanted to use OS X. Couldn’t buy one with fear what if its not good enough for me or because i need windows from time to time.
Now this gives me a great chance to get MAC hardware, run OS X and sometime boot into windows when required. What’s wrong with it? If i don’t like OS X, i can wipe it and have XP forever but at least i will get a chance to use it and you never know, may be i will like it.
I am sure there are 1000s like me.
I don’t think this will hurt Mac developers at all. Given the choice, Mac users will prefer to run Mac applications on their Macs over Windows ones any day of the week. This is only and added bonus. It allows Windows users to make the switch and still be assured that if they have to, they can still run their Windows apps for which there are no Mac versions available. But if there are Mac versions available, the users will choose those.