Apple has announced the released of BootCamp which will allow Intel-Macs to run WinXP.

The discussion is already very lively and heated as expected. Mac lovers yell sacrilege, MS users says “hmm”, and probably a few ppl like me who would go “err ….”.

The two most conspicuous places for the discussions are:

“Hell freezes over” is a common theme in the two threads.

I’m indifferent about the news even though I would one day like to have a Mac, just because. For now I can’t justify the price and the lack of an upgrade path to myself. As for dual-booting, the concept is not new. With regards to the Intel-Macs, hardcore enthusiasts and hackers would have created a solution for dual-boot sooner or later, with or without Apple’s involvement.

And ppl forget that dual-boot is clunky – you have to reboot the machine to get into the other OS. The truth is ppl will stay with the OS that does what they want and how they want it, most of the time. They are not going to be switching back and forth.

Ah, but what about if you need to do something in Windows or vice-versa, you say? I can only see this being useful for laptops used by ppl who travel between offices. Even then, most office production and image editing software produce files that can be read by either OSes. So again, how often do you think you would be dual-booting?

To play games which are Windows-only maybe? Ok say that you booted into Windows to play the game. Wouldn’t you be staying within Windows for most of the time then, when you can also browse the Net, chat with friends, blog, edit images etc.? Would you be playing the game, and then reboot into MacOS to do the other stuff? Hardly.

So the benefit for the consumer is dubious or little at best. However it might tempt fence-sitters from the Windows side to try out a Mac and then discover that they actually liked the MacOS better and become a convert. Money in the bank for Apple which it would never had made.

This is all about selling more hardware for Apple. Think of Apple’s most successful product in the past few years and what is it? iPod. And what is an iPod but a piece of hardware. What it runs is superfluous to most customers as long as it does the job, and Apple has finally realised that.

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