Boot Camp thoughts
Clearly I’m not the first to blog about Boot Camp (the beta software from Apple that let’s you dual boot Windows on an Intel-powered Mac) but I do have some perspective.
Personally, I think it’s cool. While I don’t have an Intel Mac as of yet I do plan on buying one later this year. The idea that I can run Windows using my Mac hardware will be very welcome in allowing me to test IE/Windows as well as play a game or two that aren’t ported to the Mac.
Similarly, when I was at the Philly Standards meetup lots of Windows users there were psyched about the announcement (which I think happened the day before). I get the sense that many of them have been following along with the growth of OS X, in particular it’s uptake within the alpha geeks, and while they are very curious they are not ready to totally jump ship. For this market especially I think Boot Camp will be a great hit.
As for its future, there is no doubt in my mind Apple has more plans for Boot Camp. I’d be surprised if they didn’t do more with it in 10.5, perhaps even doing Windows in a window virtualization like everyone seems to be asking for. The problem there of course is the business impact. Would companies stop doing a native OS X port and just tell their customers to use Windows? In a dual booting setup (like we have today) no one could sell that, but if Windows ran in a Classic-like layer, and bundling was available, I’m not so sure.
Posted on: April 19, 2006 – 4:01 pm
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