Well, hell has finally frozen over! The unthinkable has happened. Now you can run windows XP on an intel mac natively. Still in disbelief? Check out the apple website, http://www.apple.com/macosx/bootcamp/ After the initial shock and disbelief, I decided to look in to the pros and cons of this new strategy.
Pros
You can buy an iMac or MacBook Pro and run windows on it for the apps you need on a great hardware platform. Definietely better looking than any PC or laptop in the market. You dont need to invest in a dull beige box for a few applications that need to run on Windows. Video Games!! Yes this is where unfortunaltey as mac loyalists are always lets down, but no more.
Cons?
Welcome to the world of security holes and viruses. The Windows BIOS is something of an old age relic system that is continued to be used even in Vista, whereas Macs use EFI which is faster when it comes to boot times etc.. I hope this doesnt mean software developers like Adobe will halt developement of software for the mac because of this. We usually have followed Steve Jobs blindly when it comes to the future of Apple, but this is an incredibly bold move on his part. To co-exist with Windows is a big change in Apple's philosophy. I guess he hopes to lure the Windows users to the Mac platform and see if they can make the switch as well.
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Comments
Ben Hogan June 11, 2006 at 02:46 pm
Well i went out bought and bought the macbook and installed xp SP2 on it with bootcamp well within 2 hours thats including the 20 min road trip to PC world and WOW
What value for money Apple is now.....
The next step is the smackbook
Nitin Mathew April 8, 2006 at 08:44 am
I think its great news, although this means I will have to give up my trusty iBook G4 and move on to a MacBook Pro.
As for security issues, I don't think there will be any considering that Windows will be installed on a separate partition and from what I've read so far, when you boot in to Windows, you won't be able to access the Mac partition which means that any security threats and infiltrations will be isolated to that partition.
So Microsoft can keep their programmer busy working on patches for the gazillions of security flaws...
But i'm sure your garden variety hacker will be working on getting over this.
The bright side to all of this is that this hugely increases the potential for future PC buyers to consider a Mac...
VIVA CUPERTINO!!!
Dinesh Lalvani April 6, 2006 at 04:29 am
Cant wait to try it out, first step, abandon my trusty G4 laptop and upgrade to the MacBook Pro!! I was waiting for the 17" version to come out instead. Let me know if you have any success with playing games on this. I would love to see if the hardware is fully supported.
Magnus April 6, 2006 at 04:03 am
I tried it last night and it works. It was very smooth and went without probles. Only issue was that it seemed a bit picky about what copy of Windows XP to accept, but finally it installed.
I think it comes down to Apple trusts that Mac OS X is such a better OS than Windows is currently and by letting people run Windows more users can pick Macs.
Dotone April 5, 2006 at 10:25 pm
Windows BIOS? Such a thing exist in the OS? Then what's the hard/soft BIOS? Anyways.
You said:
It actualy applies to Mac at the moment. Mac is getting a momentum and the user base is growing for OSX so, as a result we're seeing some malware injections and security holes. I expect more of it as we go.
Bootcamp, must be one of those smart ways of outselling Win by letting people to play with it first n then judge, the way they went with iPod.