Well, this is it. Boot Camp is really beta, but its a GUI for installing Windows on a MacTel box…finally. Once I had learned that Apple had jointly developed PPC and Intel versions of OS X, I knew that Steve had thrown a couple geeks in a room with one of the new MacTel boxes and said, “Well, what would you do?” It is in Apple’s best interest to have this kind of ease of install available, as Leo LaPorte simply states, and the stock price reflects it. Although, it really is just fluff when you think of the amount of work that Apple employees had to do on Windows to make this program happen. Think about it: Boot Camp will make a CD with all the necessary drivers for Windows to work on a MacTel box. You don’t just pick that shit up at the corner drug store. You work on Windows, you reverse-engineer some small glitches in hardware interfaces, and you generally sell your soul for the mothership. I wonder if there were any Mac withdrawal symptoms for those poor souls? Anyway, so its a standard feature in Leopard. So what? Already, if you have a MacTel box, you can run Classic apps, Rosetta apps, and Universal Binary apps. That alone is a significant achievement just within the Mac OS family and much more important in my opinion. Now, I already own a Windows box as well, so I could be in the minority, but I would rather have my systems separate. If you look at the list of caveats that go with Boot Camp, you’ll start to see what I mean. The built-in iSight camera, bluetooth keyboard and mouse and the ambient light sensor won’t work on the respective machines? That is the reason why you buy a Mac, for the amenities, the pure joy of having a machine that acts more like a living thing. You see its smooth outer shell and turn it on to experience a different GUI than what you see at work. The point lies in the difference. Remember, Think Different? If I want a Windows computer I’ll get one. Leave my Mac alone. You know, a trojan virus that erases your entire hard drive will still eat the Mac partition. It doesn’t care that the flavors are different, just that there is something to eat. So, a security hole a mile wide and an inferior GUI experience.
On the other hand, Apple has legitimatized a hacker process and probably quelled a deluge of support calls of pissed off parents because little Johnny has tried to put Windows on their Mac Mini and succeeded in disabling its boot disk. Now, the parent can be told just put in the Boot Camp disc, or the 10.5 disc for that matter, and uninstall the Windows partition. Its that easy…as long as you don’t use a third-party utility to partition your hard disk.
My point is that Apple obviously knows that their hardware/software is in the crosshairs of hackers and if they beat them to the punch and give them legitimate drivers then there is no caché, no status for “hacking” Apple’s hardware. What we still haven’t seen from Apple, and I’m pretty sure they never will do this, is a legitimate boot option for OS X on a Wintel box. Yea, a Dell running OS X without anything else but a DVD disc that you insert and hit install. That is still the forbidden land for Apple and a real threat to Microsoft. Certainly more credible than Linux.
