Would You Like A Windows Box With That?

[xthread]

Apple seems to have figured out how to make hay out of Vista being late.
Since the Intel-based Macs were announced, we've been making bets on when people would figure out how to boot Windows on a Mac (something that theoretically neither Apple or Microsoft were going to support, and which Microsoft appeared to have some very good reasons not to), and whether Apple would support the effort. About two months ago, a couple of programmers claimed a bounty for having made Windows XP boot on current x86 Macs, and the question shifted to 'now that you can run, how will the OS vendors respond. Yesterday, Apple answered 'yes, please, feel free to run Windows on this hardware, in addition to MacOS,' by releasing Boot Camp, a boot loader that lets you boot your x86 Mac up as either environment (and presumably lets you share some amount of disk space between them). However, you're still not running both environments at the same time, which is really going to cut into your ability to play Temple of Elemental Evil at the same time that you've got your entire Mac environment up and running. Or your ability to run Visio and Project while you've got the rest of the Mac up, something that I often want to do.
This morning someone at the office sent around the next step, though, an app from some people called Parallels, that let's you run the Windows environment (or any other x86 environment, actually - Linux, NetBSD, Solaris...) at the same time, essentially in a window within the Mac environment. Voila, I can get my Visio, my Project, my Civ IV, my Temple of Elemental Evil, at the same time that I get a real (Unix) operating system and a reasonable desktop window system with apps designed by somebody that cares about them working well.
Now to figure out how (when) to fit a replacement laptop into the budget...
Note: Yes, I know, BootCamp and Parallels are only in Beta. So's GMail, get over it

Comments

[jonwa.livejournal.com]

Now all they need to do is come out with a mac laptop that has a 64 bit processor and a two button track pad.

Why did they go intel when they could have had an Athlon 64 dual core???

[xthread.livejournal.com]

'Cuz there'd be nowhere near the press value, I'm guessing.

[evilcyber.livejournal.com]

Why? AMD was unable to satisfy the manufacturing demand.

[xthread.livejournal.com]

Oh, well that would be a problem.

[jonwa.livejournal.com]

I spose, I'm just not willing to settle for an inferior product quite so quickly, and I thought apple was as well.

[etler.livejournal.com]

For the average Mac user, does it really matter if it's AMD vs. Intel? Or really even 64-bit? I want to be able to run Firefox, Adium and Terminal.app.

Would an Athlon 64 whatever gain them any noticeable market share? Doubt it. It'd probably just drive up costs. But I don't know anything really. I just buy Macs so I can use them. Don't really care what's inside. And I'm a geek. Weird.

[jonwa.livejournal.com]

yea, but one of the cool things about the latest powerpc towers were just how powerful they were being dual 64 based machines.
Strikes me as a step back to go to intel 32...

[unseelie23.livejournal.com]

Except that Intel 32 was starting to outperform that 64bit G5, and the gap was widening. Combine that with the fact that neither Moto or IBM could deliver a laptop G5, and Intel 32 was clearly outperforming the G4.

The Intel Macs *will* go 64 bit in short order I suspect. Keep in mind that all of the machines released to date have been, essentially, laptops. The iMac and the Mini are both, basically, iBooks on the inside.

[xthread.livejournal.com]

It's better to have a snazzier product that you can't buy than a less snazzy product that you can? Huh?

[jonwa.livejournal.com]

Well, for at least a while I can't buy anything, so it don't matter much...
But I was already convinced I would not settle for a 32 bit box to upgrade my old pc...

[ocicat.livejournal.com]

When I worked at Apple, my main project was a 486 chip expansion card for PowerMacs. They let you hotswap between Mac and Windows, and it actually worked really, really well. But they only made a few thousand of them - when they sold out, they never made more.

[xthread.livejournal.com]

That would have predated StarTrek?

[ocicat.livejournal.com]

Predating "StarTrek: Enterprise", yes.

Actually, this was in Apples dark ages, just before Steve Jobs came back to the company.

[xthread.livejournal.com]

StarTrek was a project doing something similar back in, hmm, 1996? 1995? Something like that...

[ocicat.livejournal.com]

This was in fact 1994.

[ckd]

We had one of those at my last job. It was actually quite handy, since it meant we could use Retrospect to back up the disk image of the DOS partition even before they started supporting Windows, and only 95 at that....

[unseelie23.livejournal.com]

I have one of those in my closet still. :) I always thought it was cool that we were able to make sure that the drive images for those DOS cards worked with Virtual PC.

[lrc.livejournal.com]

Your link to Boot Camp is wonky, it looks like it's a relative, rather than absolute link.

[xthread.livejournal.com]

thanks, fixed.

[lrc.livejournal.com]

and it's to ple.com rather than apple.com

See, nothing works well without an ap.

[mr-nice-gaius.livejournal.com]

Parallels sounds neat, but is it any different from VMWare?

[xthread.livejournal.com]

If the screen shot is to be believed, yes, insofar as the UI to the virtual environment is an application element within the parent MacOS X. I don't know how cooked that screen shot is, not having an x86 mac at the moment, but even if the integration is sucky, its pretty impressive, and if its good integration, its amazing.

[mr-nice-gaius.livejournal.com]

No, from the look of it, you've got WinXP running in a window on OSX, that's exactly what VMWare has been doing for years on pretty much every x86 platform. That said, they don't support OSX yet as far as I know. But if Parallels can do a better job of device virtualization - i.e. decent graphics performance, then they could be on to a good thing there.

[xthread.livejournal.com]

Oh, ok - VMWare is sexier than I'd realized.