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Apple Officially Releases Beta Dual Boot Loader
Slippy Douglas writes "Apparently, Apple has made good on one of the 30th anniversary product rumours. Apple today announced the Boot Camp Public Beta, which allows Intel Macs to easily and legally multi-boot. Boot Camp will be a standard feature in Mac OS X 10.5."
If you had a bottomless cup of coffee brewed from the best coffee beans on Earth, why would you ever drink Folgers?
If you've already got Windows or Linux, what's the point of x86 Mac?
the majority of mac buyers are booting into windows xp/vista because the majority of people use it, apple will have killed a wonderful OS and regulated their systems to nothing more than exotic pc hardware, and we all know how well high end windows notebooks sell. not well. apple has something unique, osx, why encourage people in any way to defoul their mac like that?
"It's pretty incredible that Apple has decided to do this, to say the least."
Incredible???
OS X is going bye-bye. There is nothing 'incredible' about this next step in the process.
You are living in a fantasy world if you think Apple is going to continue to support the development of an entire OS and software suite to go with it while every other x86 OEM is out there desperately trying to shave pennies off their overhead per system.
Apple is and has been for some time preparing to migrate to Windows. Apple users had better get over that trauma sooner than later. Jobs has a heart of ice and Apple computer hardware and OS/software is a major distraction from the high growth digital media side of the company.
Most Macs ship - and have shipped for years - with relatively weak, non-upgradable video cards. I doubt being able to run Windows is going to change that.
Yeah, THAT's the problem. You know, the Kooky OSS Klub is such an awesome psychological case study that it's almost too perfect. People really do see only what they wish to see.
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Inventor of the term 'pardon my French'.
Anyone remember the "PowerPC" Macs, with the ability to dual boot into MS-DOS or MacOS? They used to sell "PC Compatibility cards" that went in some of the PowerMacs, which were basically en entire PC on a card slot, complete with memory SIMMS, VGA video (output along-side the on-board Mac video output via a splitter cable), and even a PC joystick port.
To me, this whole thing is reminiscent of those days.
- mac market share has declined to 2.1-2.2% according to both IDC and Gartner
- mac sales have halved since Jobs took the helm of Apple
- iPods are the big seller
- the shift to conventional x86 hardware
I'm not convinced that they are going to abandon OSX but there is a definite shift towards consumer hardware. Their computers have gotten easier (their using conventional x86 hardware like everyone else, etc) and focusing on the iPods... you can see where their focus lies.
And please stop describing OS X as "based on BSD". There's more BSD-originating code in a typical Linux distribution than there is on OS X.
You know, the Kooky OSS Klub is such an awesome psychological case study that it's almost too perfect. People really do see only what they wish to see.
As opposed to the Fruity Mac Fanboi Klub? Hello Pot? This is kettle calling.
The Grub bootloader is meant to work on things like serial terminals if necessary. Fancy graphics that make Fruity Mac Fanbois drool on themselves would tend to complicate things. They aren't absolutely precluded but it would make a fairly small piece of code into a really grotty large piece of code. Since Apple's bootloader only has to support Apple's hardware, they can make it as fancy as they want and still keep the number of use cases to a minimum.
Before hurling insults at OSS users and developers, how about you grow half a clue? Incidentally, judging from the amount of OSS code in OS X it would seem that Apple has more of a clue about this than you do.
"Indeed, in my experience this is a big move inside the office market."
No real IT departments outside of tiny little companies are going to be allowing/buying/supporting overpriced x86 Mac hardware into their companies.
What, because people like you think OS X is neat? Dream the fuck on.
clearly indicate how Apple will be "bringing it" against Vista with Leopard. Apple is positioning Windows as the broken down, patched up, late again has-been with too many promises and too few benefits - but we'll do what Microsoft can't - get Windows running on new, nicer hardware in very little time. Apple makes Microsoft look like fools, especially by touting EFI and the fact that Windows STILL won't support it in Vista.
Apple just makes something up, and proclaims it's "Better" then the competition. The BIOS works fine, why change it just to be "Cool" and break 20 years of backwards compatability?
autopr0n is like, down and stuff.
Oh man everytime I use Windows BIOS just ruins my day. There I am using my computer, running programs and man oh man that clunky BIOS just brings me down.
I've tried to get help for this depression but I guess the doctor really needed to prescribe me a new Intel Mac with EFI for my BIOS blues. I'm so stuck in the '80s and it's holding me back. Even my salary is stuck in the '80s. And I still listen to the Go Gos.... on vinyl.
Save me Apple, work your EFI magic on my sad 80s retro life.
Sometimes my arms bend back.