A comment on
Boot Camp is smoke... over at the Unofficial Apple Weblog says this:
That might just be the smartest thing I've read about this whole Boot Camp deal. Personally dual-booting isn't what I'm after; I'd be much more likely to use virtualization or even better, true emulation, Rosetta-style.
I've heard this from several people, and I just keep thinking of OS/2, and how it seamlessly ran Windows applications right next to OS/2 apps. In fact, it did it pretty much better than Windows. Writing an OS/2 native app just didn't provide any value. It wasn't better enough. Perhaps it might have kept OS/2 around longer, until their agreement expired and they no longer had enough access to windows to keep the win32 api compatible (remember Open32?).
Virtualization doesn't suffer from that problem, but still. If Photoshop for windows ran smoothly and flawlessly on OSX, how long would Adobe maintain the OSX version?
Virtualization as we know it today is pretty much as close as Apple can get to running windows apps smoothly without cannibalizing some of their pillar applications. It may even be too far; I'm not convinced we'll see it from Apple or included in the OS. Boot camp solves many people's problem who are switching (I don't want to abandon my software yet, I want to play my games, if it doesn't work out I don't want to have wasted $2000, etc...), but isn't seamless enough for companies with large OS X application codebases to just say "run the windows version."
If someone wants virtualization (as many do), there will be ample third parties, and just the extra overhead of purchasing the virtualization software and windows will keep the Mac mainstream preferring OS X over windows apps.
Boot Camp gives people switching a safety net, and that will give them a few more users (just as Daring Fireball's comments on Windows as the new classic had to say). That's it's real purpose I think; removal of one more barrier to switching.
I completely agree. Boot camp represents some very low hanging fruit for Apple. They didn't have to do much to make Windows work on their hardware, and I'm sure they reviewed the hacks that people were doing since the release of the MacBook Pro to nail down the details. The up-side is that you can play games and other gnarly resource-hogging apps without any virtualization panalties.
That said, virtualization is where it's at. "If someone wants virtualization (as many do), there will be ample third parties".... and ample third parties there are. Starting with Parallel Workstation (http://www.parallels.com/en/products/workstation/mac/) through to the soon-to-be-release VMware OS X player (it's going to happen). The biggest question in my mind is if Apple is going to offer its own virtualization product.
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