Real Kato Blog: Apple Watch: Windows XP on a Mac? Egads!

Apple has officially released a patch and a utility to allow Windows XP to boot on Intel Macs.

Recently, there was a lot of hubbub when a couple of guys hacked up Windows XP to boot on an Intel Mac. It worked, but there were various problems with graphics drivers, and the process was complicated.

Well now, Apple seems to be officially sanctioning this process, as they've produced a clean installation procedure and a full set of drivers. They've got a utility that allows repartitioning the hard drive without erasing it. They've released Windows drivers to support graphics, audio, networking, airport wireless, Bluetooth, and Apple keyboards. The software package is called "Boot Camp", and it's now available as a free public beta.

Apple has also announced that this feature will be an integral part of "Leopard", it's next operating system release (Mac OS X 10.5).

Undoubtedly, a lot of people are going to try to read between the lines of this move. The main question will be, is Apple planning to ditch Mac OS X for Windows altogether? I can't imagine that would be the case, but a lot of people will speculate about it. I think Apple would lose its sole remaining competitive advantage if it got rid of Mac OS X. The hardware would be differentiated by aesthetics alone, and I don't think Apple can survive that way.

Apple's definitely playing a risky game. If application developers know that all Macs can boot into Windows, then why produce Mac applications at all? I think game developers will especially fall off the Mac bandwagon because of this.

It's possible Apple has something up its sleeve to counteract this risk and make developers stay on board. I'm thinking a cross-platform application development framework, maybe, that allows developers to write for Windows and Mac OS X at the same time. I talked about this for gaming before, but now I'm thinking, if that framework allowed developers to make a Mac-looking application that also happened to run on Windows (a la iTunes for Windows), that might be interesting. The important thing would be that the application work seamlessly on Mac OS X, and decently on Windows.

The number one most important element is already in place in Windows: QuickTime. Now the Cocoa APIs became available, and XCode could build for Windows... watch out.

Permalink 2 Comment

Posted by Ken in: techwatch

Comments

Comment #1 from Crouching Hamster (Guest)
2006 Apr 5 - 5:45 pm : #

They must know something we don't. Anyway, let's hope so.

Comment #2 from Steve (Guest)
2006 Apr 6 - 4:03 pm : #

maybe they're just out for a quick cash grab. I'm probably one of many who is now considering buying a Mac for his next computer since I don't have to worry about not being able to use all my old software. Now those of us who were constrained to windows for software reasons (and there are a LOT of us) can go ahead and buy those Macs we've always wanted.
And besides, most of the people who currently use macs use them because they don't like windows, just because they can run windows doesn't mean they will. I think the software developers are aware of that.
I think all this can do is make money for Apple. And as long as the copies of XP are licensed, Microsoft should love it too.

Comments are closed for this post.

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