Friday, April 07, 2006

More thoughts on Bootcamp

This appears to be the opposite strategy that Apple attempted in the 90s. The company licensed its OS to be loaded on hardware produced by other companies. It wasn't successful and Apple ultimately bought back the rights from the companies in question.

I was Skyping with my brother and I mentioned to him that Apple almost had no choice. It turns out that they have been working on this for some time. They were going to release it in OSX.5. With the maconxp project being successful, they released it earlier than expected (and to the suprise of the entire market). From everything I've read, the maturity of bootcamp is remarkable for a beta release.

Personally I can't see much of a downside for Apple. The Mac-Zealot market won't stop using OSX. There is simply too strong a following. But I can very much see that the Windows market might want to have Apple hardware to reduce the number of computers that one needs to have for anything from development to the curiosity of having a Mac.

One of the programmers that works with me has shared with me that this will almost certainly have him buying a Mac.

Thursday, April 06, 2006

I think Hell must have frozen over.

Apple has announced that they are officially sanctioning use of Windows on Intel based Macs. Called Bootcamp , the public beta is available on the Apple site. It seems that they have been planning this for some time but weren't going to release it until OSX.5 was being shipped. I'm guessing that the success on XP on a Mac Contest caused Apple to make the release ahead of schedule.

I think that this opens up very interesting opportunities for Apple. This could represent a tipping point in their desktop and laptop strategy. You can't run OSX on a PC...at least not yet.

Mac minis are cheap and are Intel based now. iMacs are pretty cheap.

Interesting things are afoot, I'm pretty sure that Hell just froze over.

This page is powered by Blogger. Isn't yours?