Given the recent delay of Vista, Apple could make some serious progress in increasing its market share. If I were Steve Jobs, I'd go straight to Dell and HP and license Mac OS X to them, but ONLY to sell to corporate customers. Apple could charge 10% of the cost of Windows, and still come out way ahead due to the market share gains. It's not like Apple would lose in hardware sales, since that business segment wouldn't buy Macs anyway, and Dell and HP wouldn't be licensed to sell OS X to the consumer market. Support for hardware would fall on the licensee.

An interesting take on the recent delay from a former 'Softie (now at El Goog).

That's just crazy talk. Apple won't license their OS on other hardware. Have you been talking to Crackley or something.

Vista is great.
Vista is good.
That is all.

Nice article on Vista and Altair btw. I think that the UMPC is an example of MS sticking to the original strategy... computers everywhere.

...I would hurry up and do something cool for the 30th Anniversary! I thought they were supposed to announce big video iPod this week or something...

Official XP on the Mac is here! Paul - order up that new laptop.

Holy crap! I think that Apple just wiped out the PC laptop market. Why buy one of those junkers, when you could have a sweet, seet Macbook?

Love this quote from the Apple site about the bios: "Sadly, Windows XP, and even the upcoming Vista, are stuck in the 1980s with old-fashioned BIOS."

Apparently this thing has proper video card support. I think this is a very smart move for Apple. Also it is good for Microsoft (in the short term at least). If you can also get Linux to boot on this box cleanly then this is a smoking solution for hackers for sure. Ultimately as mentioned in another post, virtualization will make quick trips to alternate OS's easier, but for hard core work you'll still want to dual boot. Does this mean that I might actually consider buying an Apple computer at some point in the future?? Maybe.

I thought Vista was using the EFI boot stuff...

Video drivers and official support is huge. The package is like 83 megs, a lot of which is the windows drivers for the hardware, so I'm not sure that this means Linux will run. That will probably still be a separate project.

I also like the idea of virtualization, but think of all the hardware arbitration that has to happen. Multiple OSs and processors fighting over virtual memory, direct screen interaction, etc. It's cool, but I agree with John that dual boot is required for full performance. Maybe if you did virtualization, and put all other OSs in "sleep" mode, it might provide equivalent performance.

I wonder how the heck they convinced Steve to officially let Windows run on a Mac. This feature is going to be built into the main OS next version, so it's not just a separate hack for geeks. Jobs did basically flip everything on it's head: instead of licensing MacOS for PCs, he turned the mac into a PC, and lets you run that on his hardware. Crazy.

As for buying an Intel mac... This was the official word I was waiting for. Now that it's officially supported, I'm leaning heavily towards MacBook (Where's the 12" widescreen?). However, I'll wait for the Rev. B.

Oh yeah, Apple makes some great hardware but never buy the rev A of a brand new platform, and that goes for pretty much any hardware. There are just too many things that can go wrong, and it takes until rev B to weed out all the problems.

Some interesting stuff I've read is that people are predicting this combination might spell trouble for Linux on the desktop, since there's really no reason with OS X and Windows. I've also heard that some corporate customers want to provide employees with laptops that have a personal partition and a protected, corporate partition. This could be a good solution for that (not sure everyone wants to become experts in 2 OSs though).

In general I think this will boost hardware sales and get people who didn't want to buy an apple because they don't know if they'll really like the OS. Industry competitors are already spinning it that "if you want a supported PC, you shouldn't bother running XP on Mac". What they're missing is that Apple plans on having them run Mac OS, and only having that XP install on there as insurance and for "legacy" applications and data.

Apple dominates the MP3 player market with a high margin player. Lets see if they can do this in the consumer PC space.

Also, it's kind of interesting how this will play out with the Vista delays.

This will give Apple a solid 8 months to work out technology kinks and their full marketing message. When Vista comes out, Apple will be fully armed with an OS that can compare favorably 1 to 1.

The only drawback would be the cost of the hardware, everything else being equal. But Apple has no problem hand waving that away. If that's the only barrier, they've as good as won. iPod is the perfect example.

In reality, Apple still has a huge barrier to get over with applications available on the PC. However, the traditional windows app advantages (games, internet apps and productivity apps) have all been been changing (movement to consoles, open source and java, and 3rd party/AJAX) respectively.

Ok rumors are flowing like water today:
J wants a 12" widescreen, how about a 13.3 in Macbook?

And the one that takes the cake... OS X universal binary apps to run under Windows. Far fetched is the first thing that comes to mind, but then again, OS X on Intel? Windows on an Apple machine? It's a strange new world.

There is no way OS X binaries will run on Windows (that article is from before the BootCamp announcement). If you could run Mac apps on Windows, why would you need to buy a Mac? It would invalidate their entire business model (selling hardware).

I heard about that 13.3, but it's like an iBook from what I understand. I need (want) DVI on lappy. And a core duo. And not cataract white.

As for the universal binary thing. I see where the rumor is going - it would potentially give mac software developers a larger market to sell their software, hopefully pulling in a larger developer base for mac software. I'm not sure that many PC software vendors are going to want to port their software over to this layer for a while though. I guess if you believe that the only real innovative applications are written for Mac anyway, this might be a viable strategy for answering the application issue with the Mac. Technically, a full emulation layer sounds a bit questionable though.

Ok I'll start by saying I don't believe for a minute that this rumor is true either, but, I wouldn't say it invalidates their business model.

I would argue that most people don't buy Mac's for the apps. For starters there aren't that many of them. I doubt anyone buys a Mac strickly for Iphoto for example. But they do buy for the hardware, the slick OS and the brand name. (Well, to be clear, 3-4% of computer users do anyway.) Most serious applications already have Windows versions so it's not much different than today. Imagine if you could write an application once (he he, where have I heard this before?) and it would run at full speed on either Mac or Windows. That might be a way to get more Mac compatible apps developed - and that would be good for Apple.

HalfLife 2 running on an Intel iMac. Looks pretty good.

Ok I can think of one reason not to buy a MacBook to run XP - that stupid one button mouse.

Sigh... once an AppleHater, always an AppleHater...

Don't you have a little usb mouse with your laptop anyways? You could always just hold down "option" or the apple key when clicking, which has the same effect as right click.

So tell me you love 1 button mouse now? Hold down this key for right click, hold down these two keys for middle button click.

No, I hate the one button mouse, but I use a USB (mighty) mouse that does right, middle and squeeze click. I think I'd prefer holding extra keys to right click than deal with the little nubbins on my last laptop... those things never stop drifting.

And Cringely is off into the weeds!

Cringely is an idiot. He's like... not worth commentary.

He's kind of like a crazy guy talking to himself on the street. You definitely don't want to make eye contact, but it can be fun to listen to the wacked out stuff he says.

Back to bootcamp, I really hope this is just an initial step towards supporting Windows via virtualization in the future without the penalty of H/W emulation in S/W. Work out the disk partitioning, basic h/w compatibility and driver issues now in a dual boot mode with the early adopters and experimenters. Ultimately Windows compatibility helps Apple with open up additional market share, especially in enterprise and maybe even regain market leadership in education.

BTW, remember those crazy mac Performas that were available with a 486 DOS nubus cards from Apple? I recall they were really expensive (and this was on top of the significant premium Apple used to charge). Just a reminder that Apple has provided support for non-Apple OSes in the past.

Good point George, I think that's a great idea for them to debug everything with a limited driver set and get it going for virtualization. In many ways it's something that would be incredibly difficult for standard Windows because of the huge variety of hardware support required. This totally plays to Apple's advantage.

It seems like you should be able to handle the device arbitration in cases like games by saying: "WindowsXP needs direct control over the hardware interface for maximum performance. To continue, your other virtual machines will be suspended during the duration of this game." Obviously not that technical for end users, but I'm totally digging this idea of putting the other OSs into sleep/hibernate to get 100% performance in situations like games.

I DO remember those DOS cards. Not sure if Jobs really liked them or not. They had AIX machines too that didn't really get that much love. The thing I like about this whole move, is it seems Apple is finally willing to have itself compared directly with Windows/Intel. (An apples-to-apples comparison if you will wah-wah-waaah). I am so glad Apple is finally stepping up and saying "you will rather boot into our OS than Windows".

I think it's funny how pundits like Cringely can't see beyond initiall announcements. "No enterprise will ever buy unsupported Windows". "They won't go with a Beta product". "Virtualization is where it's at, I need to copy and paste between OSs". Please. If large enterprise accounts come knocking on the door - you know Apple will find a way to provide a support solution (at a minimum with an outsource Windows support company trained in the Apple hardware). Come to think of it - it's probably much easier to support Windows on Apple's controlled hardware than on a standard PC, or even a Dell with crazy add on cards.

And Cringely is still in the weeds!

From a hard-core Windows gamer.

Wow runs twice as fast under Windows than OS X on the same hardware. That is a pretty bit hit to Apple's claims of performance superiority. I wonder if this boot camp is going to have a negative impact on Apple in the short run as it allows for direct (apples to apples) performance comparisions of popular apps. We no longer have to speculate about the differences in the hardware etc.

Yeah, it's all those integer operations slowing down the Mac.

Ok seriously this guys does not understand.

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