Boot Camp

No sooner do I get to the office this morning than I'm flooded with messages and emails from folks asking if I've tried Boot Camp yet.

Now, to be clear, this isn't the first method released to get XP installed on your Intel Mac, but it's deffinitely the easiest. I have to wonder if someone at Apple was trying to win the $10,000 contest for getting XP to boot on an Intel Mac, and their side project got redirected. ;-)

The process is as easy as you'd expect from Apple, but it's not quick and it requires a couple of restarts.

First you have to have updated to 10.4.6. And you have to have the 1.0 Intel firmware update that was released today. With both of those installed, you can then install Boot Camp.

The application reminds you that the product is still beta, and that you're taking your life in your own hands. But after that it's a step-by-step process. The software will ask you if you need to burn a disc with the Mac hardware drivers you'll need in Windows. If you've already done this than you can move along. Burning the disc is straightforward though.

The next step is to re-partition your drive. Typically this has required users to backup all their data, re-partition the drive which erases all their data, and then move their files back. But there have been some 3rd party partitioning tools that would let you re-partition your drive (within reason) without loosing your data. Boot Camp gives you this option too.

But in my case Boot Camp was unable to partition my hard drive (with 11GB free). I am fortunate though to have a spare MacBook around (for just such testing), so I did a clean install of 10.4.5 from the factory DVDs, upgraded to 10.4.6, ran the firmware update, and installed Boot Camp.

Within minutes I was restarting and booting from the XP service pack 2 CD. The XP installation is mostly painless, with few options for the user except some language settings, and the type of network you're connected too.

Once XP has booted up and is running you have to install the drivers Apple gives you as part of the Boot Camp process. These are drivers for the video card, the trackpad, bluetooth, ethernet, and wireless. All things we Mac users don't typically need to worry about. But as straight forward as this step should be it took several installs, uninstalls, and reinstalls to get all the drivers installed and recognized.

After about 2 hours I had XP running on my MacBook Pro. Initial opinion is that its at least as fast as an Acer using the same Intel process we've got in the office. I only had enough time to download Firefox and download a game demo (Rome: Total War) to test out the general speed and graphics capabilities. No benchmarking, but the graphics ran ver nicely, and the speed of the game was more than acceptable.

Prooving that it's doable, and actually using it are two different things. In my day-to-day work there are only a handful of programs (literally five) that I can't run directly on my Mac. To run them I use MS Remote Desktop Client to connect to a headless PC under my desk. Everything else I can do on my Mac. I can't see rebooting just to use one or all of those five programs for the few minutes at a time that I need them.

No, this is a great step forward for many users, but not for everybody. The great step forward for everybody will be Virtualization.

Mac OS X users are already familiar with Virtualization - that's how Classic mode works. Its not an emulator, but more an environment. Windows users have had products like VMWare and Unix users have WINE. Both allow you to install and run Windows applications because the either allow Windows to be up and running (VMWare) alongside the primary operating system (run XP alongside NT or 2000 alongside XP), or replace the Windows operating system components with their own allowing a Windows program to run alongside a Unix program.

The future for us Mac users is the day you can double-click on the windows program and have a window launch that the program is working in, alongside your Safari and iChat programs. No switching, no rebooting.

And I've seen some people ponder what Boot Camp means. Well, Microsoft isn't crying - they've got smiles on their face. Dell on the other hand is probably rubbing its hands together in worry. We all have to remember that despite how great Mac OS X is that Apple is first, last, and always a Hardware company. Their software is intended to help push the sale of hardware. ITunes pushes the iPod, Mac OS X, iLife, and Final Cut Pro pushes Macs. Microsoft sells an operating system (and tons of other stuff), but if a user can install XP on a Mac, that just gives Microsoft one more customer to buy their operating system. Microsoft is hardware agnostic. Dell on the otherhand is a hardware company. They'll bundle an operating system with their hardware just to make life easier for the customer. If that's Apple's OS, or Microsoft's OS, or even Linux or something else, they don't care. As long as people want to buy their hardware. But now Apple has fired a warning shot over Dell's bow, and given them notice that they've got to pay closer attention to what Apple is doing.

I can see something like this flying again at Apple...