Boot Camp!

Boot Camp is a public beta of a utility from Apple that will let you run Windows on your Intel Mac. Nice to see the folks in Cupertino recognizing the excitement about running Windows in the Mac community. I'm super impressed that they did this! Way to open up!

Comments

• Anonymous
  April 05, 2006
  I'm really excited about this, but one thing I find interesting is the name they use - "Boot Camp".  The boot system that Macs use instead of BIOS is called EFI, and if you take a look at this (ftp://download.intel.com/technology/efi/docs/pdfs/IDF04Long_EFIS002.pdf) slide presentation that Microsoft made way back in 2004 about EFI and 'Longhorn', you'll notice that it has a section called "Boot Camp".  Coincidence?
• Anonymous
  April 06, 2006
  You're kidding, right? "Excitement about running Windows in the Mac community"? Don't you think it has way more to do with luring some switchers who currently use the excuse, "I'd switch, but I have this one app that only runs in Windows"?
• Anonymous
  April 06, 2006
  It could be that this is motivated by unblocking switchers, but I honestly think there are few customers who'd be willing to reboot their computer into another OS just to use one application, especially if they need to use data from that application in other applications, or use it simultanously with something else.
  
  There are a bunch of theories out there about why they did this. It could be switcher motivated... it also could be so that they can have a set of "native" applications that haven't been ported to OSX/X86 yet (Adobe Photoshop is a great example here)... or it could just be motviated by support costs. It's gotta be cheaper to have the guys at the genius bar working with boot camp to get customers back up and running than having them cope with any home-grown stuff that they may have never seen before...
  
  ...or maybe OSX's days are numbered... and they're really just a hardware company...
  
  ...maybe that's just dreaming... ;-)