I just read this Cnet article about Boot Camp, Apple’s effort to make their machines run Windows.
Have to admit it was a little hard concentrating, mainly because of the question that kept going on and on in my head: But In God’s Name, WHY?
To quote:
There’s more to this than playing Minesweeper on a Mac, of course. Aside from the wow factor, Boot Camp, especially when it becomes a standard feature of the Mac OS, should usher in a new era for the Mac platform. Though you’ll need to pony up for a copy of Windows, your Mac will be able to run any software that its PC competitors can run, not too mention all the Apple apps that PCs can’t run. With Boot Camp, for example, you can run the iLife apps and the latest 3D game, say, F.E.A.R., on the same system.
Oh yeah I’m all game about running Win apps on a Mac, like that new thing Trojan.Emcodec, and the i-just-gotta-have Adware-Gator, or the old classic W32.Beagle.DZ.
But still, let me ask you, since I’m not a Mac user myself, was I dreaming, or weren’t Mac users such deep-seated haters of all things Microsoft?
And according to the article, aside from having to shell out extra $$ for WinXP, and even cases of slower performance (!), it’s very likely you’re going to have to deal with incompatibility issues such as drivers, middleware and all those niggling things that, oh you know, were the reasons why they use Macs to begin with.
So other than the geekiness such a development results in (“ooohh we can double boot!”), I’d like to shelve this new development in the “Forget it” department, or maybe directly out the Windows (pun intended), why don’t you.
So, a shoutout to Mac users out there, if you want to run Windows, buy a Windows machine. If you still wanna double boot, there’s this thing called Linux.