The 13th Floor

Reactions to Apple's Boot Camp (beta) release

On April 5, 2006 Apple stunned the world by officially announcing and releasing a beta test version of a technology that will allow Intel-based Macintosh users to install and run Windows XP (with sp2 pre-installed). They call it Boot Camp and what it does is allow a Mac user to very quickly and easily partition off some space on their hard drive to install Windows and create a drivers disk to allow Windows XP to run as well as possible on the Intel-based Mac hardware.

Half of the world is claiming this is the end of MacOS X and that Apple will use this to move Mac users over to Windows.

Half of the world is claiming this is the start of Apple gaining marketshare and convincing more Windows users to move to Macintosh.

I would say that the Boot Camp technology is equally viable for both scenarios. Consider:

TRUE: Boot Camp would allow Mac users to install and run Windows on their elegant Apple computer and never run MacOS X again.
TRUE: Boot Camp would allow Mac users to install and run Windows for a few programs and run MacOS X for all their other programs.
TRUE: Boot Camp would allow Windows users to buy a Macintosh and run both Windows and MacOS X.
TRUE: Boot Camp would allow Windows users who buy a mac and try out MacOS X to switch completely over and never run Windows again, but still have the safety net of being able to run Windows until they truly feel comfortable with the move.

I don't think anyone can, at this point in time, decisively say whether this is the beginning of the end for MacOS X or the beginning of the next great stage for Apple which once dominated the PC industry.

But in the meantime users will be able to run both and have the best of both worlds. There are some things for which Windows is a better platform. There are other things for which MacOS X is a better platform. For that matter, there are some things for which IBM's OS/2 is still a better platform (in my humble opinion, the single best email program ever made, even today in 2006, was a late 90's OS/2 program called PMMail/2). And yes, with proper drivers it's possible that OS/2 (or Linux or BSD or even DOS) could be run on an Intel based Macintosh computer after using Boot Camp to partition the drive; Apple just won't be providing device drivers for those OSes the way they do for Windows XP.