Bigmouth Strikes Again: Carrie Marshall's blog

Why Apple’s Boot Camp is a stroke of genius

In no particular order:

* They’ve just opened up Apple hardware to gazillions of potential buyers, including corporates and gamers [Gazillions is a technical term].

* Microsoft will be quite happy: they can sell XP licences to Mac owners now. It doesn’t affect Virtual PC sales (assuming VPC is coming to Intel Macs), and Microsoft doesn’t make PCs.

* It’s a big kick up the arse of the PC manufacturers.

* It’s going to generate acres of positive publicity and general warm and fuzzy feelings towards the firm.

I’ll no doubt add more when I’ve had time to think about this.

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Gary

Comments

0 responses to “Why Apple’s Boot Camp is a stroke of genius”

  1. Squander Two

    > It doesn’t affect Virtual PC sales

    I must have missed something. How on Earth does this not affect Virtual PC sales?

  2. Gary

    VPC’s enemy is VMWare and other emulators, not dual-booting: the ability to run Win apps in a window and copy, paste etc isn’t provided by Boot Camp. And BC is intel-only. There’s a lot of PPC macs out there.

  3. Squander Two

    Fair enough, so it doesn’t wipe out VPC sales. But it’s bound to affect them.

  4. Gary

    Not until (or if) MS makes an intel mac version…

  5. Squander Two

    So you don’t think there are any VPC users at all who will think that Boot Camp meets their needs better? That’s quite surprising.

  6. Gary

    I think the people who need VPC already have it and run it on PPC macs. Where things get interesting is if – as is widely rumoured – Leopard includes virtualisation rather than just dual-booting. If it does, then there’s no point in making an Intel version of VPC.

  7. Gary

    Incidentally, some interesting things are already happening with boot camp. Says engadget:

    Third parties are already filling in some of the gaps. With a basic Boot Camp setup, you can’t access your Mac OS X partition from your Windows XP partition. However, MediaFour’s MacDrive software solves that problem. Now you can boot into Windows and read and write to your Mac partition, which could allow you to have common settings files for some cross-platform apps. Whether or not it will also allow you to share your iTunes library between partitions remains to be seen.