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Going To Boot Camp
An anonymous reader writes "PC World has first impressions of what it's like to run Windows with Boot Camp, the recently announced official dual-boot software for the Intel Macs." From the article: "Back in Windows, I got right down to business and installed a few games to put the graphics and sound support to the test. The quick and dirty verdict on performance? Most impressive. Doom 3 and Far Cry both ran smoothly with high-end graphics options turned on. In both cases, I had to tweak visual settings manually, since the games automatically set themselves to very low settings. Far Cry, for example, autodetected very low settings, but it ran without a hitch when I bumped the resolution up to 1280 by 720, with all visual quality options set to 'High.'"
One sad thing about this, as a Mac user and Mac gamer, is that this probably puts a big fat nail in the coffin for AAA OS X-native game titles. Or maybe it's less of a nail, and more like sticky tape, meaning the coffin can be reopened if OS X attains a bigger critical mass.
Another interesting side-effect is the stats. Apple is always fond of calling people 'switchers', as if when the person buys a Mac for his home, his Windows box suddenly disappears. Well, now, we've got a machine that can run anything....so...er...what is it? Makes me feel like the only real way to track platform penetration will be browser stats.
Strange new developments, indeed, even though we all knew it would happen when Apple went Intel.
gameDB
So he installed a better browser, because IE is crap... and ran iTunes. Why is he even doing these things in XP, he has OS X on the damn machine!!
Obviously the big reason is games, but I think this is going to be bad for gaming on macs in the long run. Not many developers released their games on mac before, but why bother now? Just install XP!
Its the first time I've seen so many Macheads get so excited about running windows (or windows applications).
You obviously weren't around 10 years ago for the release of SoftWindows, Virtual PC, RealPC, or OrangeMicro's PCI x86 compatible cards. The only people who are shocked by Apple's actions and Apple users' excitement about Windows compatibility are those who haven't been paying much attention. Heck, Apple even had print ads and a TV commercial showing their systems running both OSs at the same time.
sin(6cos(r)+5A)
No doubt this 1st beta release is a response to kill any adoption of the "hack" method with attendant community creation. I think that it's very likely that the normal course of events would have seen the beta released later with all hardware drivers already written at least in rough form.