Why’s everyone so surprised about Boot Camp?
I was just over on Digg, and I’m surprised at how many people are, well, surprised about Apple’s release of Boot Camp yesterday.
Really, now?
Once upon a time, back in the early days of Mac OS X, people were working on incredible hacks to get X11 running on the Mac. From what I recall, there were two options for getting X11 on your Mac: DarwinX and OroborOSX. I installed and ran those, and crossed my fingers every time I’d launch them because they weren’t the most stable beasts in town, but they worked. And it wasn’t long before Apple saw all these people running around with hacky X11 implementations running on top of Mac OS X. Their solution was to release an X11 package as a public beta.
Hmmm…sound familiar?
Right.
Apple knows its users are crafty little buggers, and when they see someone working a hack to implement something on the system, they’re usually pretty quick to respond. In this case, we got to see people compete for a $14,000 purse to see who could be the first to do a hack install of Windows XP on an Intel Mac. And it happened, and someone walked away with some loot, but there were caveats out the ass to getting the hack to work on your system. Worst of all, one of the possible pitfalls of incorrectly implementing the hack was that you could turn your lovely new MacBook Pro into a doorstop, and who’d want that?
If tons of people started doing this — turning their Macs into doorstops — it could potentially be a PR nightmare for Apple. And while that hack/install wasn’t sanctioned by Apple, people would still bitch and complain and make it look like it was Apple’s fault for not letting them install Windows XP on a Mac. Those poor buggers…they were forced to install XP on their Mac, so surely it’s Apple’s fault. Not.
And that leads us back to Boot Camp.
Apple clearly saw that people wanted to run XP on their Intel Macs, for whatever reason that might be. And they saw the potential harm that could be done by unskilled (or slightly skilled) users. Rather than put them in harm’s way, Apple took something they admittedly were working on for Leopard, and released it as a public beta. Good for them!
And like the X11 package Apple released as a public beta for Jaguar, I’m hoping that Boot Camp does get rolled into the Leopard release as an optional install, just like X11 is now. Of course, what would be better is if you didn’t have to reboot to use XP (or Vista), but if you could run both operating systems side-by-side as you can with XP and Linux using VMware. Now that would be really sweet!
So don’t act so surprised by Apple’s Boot Camp beta. We’ve seen it before, and I’m sure we’ll see them do something similar again (and again, and again).
It sounds like you're suggesting that they were working on this for Leopard and then decided (after the $14,000 contest?) to release this as a beta for Tiger. However, trust me, big operating system level software projects in the middle of development for one unreleased OS don't just get released to beta for another already released OS on a whim. (And yes, I would know exactly what that might entail.) I'm sure they were planning this for quite some time. Even if they could develop it that fast, this type of thing requires months of testing before it's ready for Beta. Beta doesn't mean they can even afford a small risk of accidentally destroying the data on your hard drive.
They may have decided to release it a bit earlier than originally planned as a beta people are so excited about the idea, but the delivery to Tiger has surely been in the plans for a while.
Darwine would be even better than VMware and the like. No Windoze needed.
But better still would be Dharma.
Hey, Rainy, how about some links?
The way I see it Boot Camp is nothing more than an application that burns a disk image to CD-R and has the ability to repartition a drive without deleting existing data. I think they started to develop the application after word got around that someone made $14,000 on a dirty hack. Live-partitioning might be a feature of Disk Utility 10.6 or 11.0 and that's the beta part about Boot Camp.
You know what none of us geeks are saying about Boot Camp, but should? Apple stock went up about 10% yesterday (up 6.04 to 67.21) on the news of Boot Camp. It would be interesting to know how many millions of dollars of market value this announcement amounted to.
Talk about turning lemons into lemonade -- one of the dings against Apple during the recent sell-off is concern about the Intel transition. Boot Camp suddenly turns that thinking on its head, making Wall Street see the Intel conversion not as a risk but an opportunity.
Chuck, you mentioned in the recent "Distributing the Future" podcast story on BootCamp that people that buy a Mac strictly to run Windows on it are going to face severe limitations because they will only be able to have FAT partitions of 32 GB or less (otherwise they'll have to format as NTFS, which is read-only). This is not exactly right.
Yes, you have that limitation if you use Windows to format your partition. Because MS wants to push NTFS, they crippled their OS to not allow large FAT partitions.
But, there is a way around this. Simply pick up any Linux distribution and start up the installation CD. Format the drive using the Linux partitioning tools and your drives can be as large as you want! I recently purchased a 200 GB USB drive that I wanted to use with workstations running WinXP, Linux or OS X. I used a Mandriva installation CD to create 3 60GB partitions and a 20 GB, and now I can happily write to the drive no matter what PC it's connected to.
cheers
S