Apple has stated on its website that will add support for Windows 7 to Boot Camp later this year. “Apple will support Microsoft Windows 7 (Home Premium, Professional, and Ultimate) with Boot Camp in Mac OS X Snow Leopard before the end of the year. This support will require a software update to Boot Camp.”
Running Windows 7 Pro on my iMac. Works just fine already.
Well it should, seeing as how it’s mostly Vista under the hood. What would a bootcamp software update be needed for? A driver update I could understand if some of the windows driver APIs had changed as they did from XP to Vista, but that’s not the case in 7.
I’ll give you a couple of reasons…
The official WiFi and GPU drivers are relatively ancient and cause issue with some applications (to be fair the official Mac OS X WiFi driver is not as good as the updated Broadcom one on Windows either as far as WiFi stability is concerned [it just won’t like to be assigned an address through DHCP and has other stability issues]).
Can’t you just install the latest official Broadcom or Intel/Nvidia drivers in Windows 7? Couldn’t Apple just package them up anyway? After all, when you’re running Windows, you’re running completely like a normal PC, so normal drivers will work.
That’s why I did, and have had no troubles with any of it running Windows 7RC on a unibody MacBook Pro with SL10.6 on it as well. Works great!!
No, normal drivers will not work for the nVIDIA GPU for example because they have slightly different ID’s. You need to get a custom .inf file and update the driver manually.
I’m assuming Apple could not sue Psystar for Rebel EFI seeing that Boot Camp pretty much does the same thing. Let the modding begin!
That actually depends on how open EFI is, i.e. does Intel control the licensing and do they require royalties for implementing the EFI specifications? You’re correct, at least assuming any common sense remains in our legal system, that Apple couldn’t sue Psystar over Rebel EFI. However, Intel very possibly could if they hold all licensing to the EFI specification and, given Intel’s behavior in the past, I’d say there’s a pretty good chance of this. I know the unified EFI forum manages the specification but I don’t know the licensing details, if any. Either way, Apple holds no claim over EFI, they simply use a custom EFI instead of the legacy BIOS.
Side note: Assuming Windows 7’s EFI support is fully implemented, bootcamp technically wouldn’t even need to emulate the BIOS to support it and it would simply be a partitioner and Windows drivers for Apple hardware.