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Bunk Camp - Apple Gets It Wrong?
An anonymous reader writes "CNET.com.au has posted a commentary that attempts to cut away the hype surrounding Boot Camp. From the article: 'Boot Camp will do little to coax Windows XP users into switching to Mac OS X. For this to happen, Apple needs to either license out OS X to all users -- not just Mac owners -- or support a true Mac virtualisation application.'"
It's already happened. Parallels has a beta out right now.
The reason Apple doesn't want to sell OS X to PC users (aside from the obvious ties with their more lucrative hardware business) is that OS X simply wouldn't be as stable or bulletproof in the PC world as it has been in the Mac world.
Nonsense. The reason Apple doesn't want to sell OS X to PC users is because they make much more money selling hardware than software. Apple is in business to make a profit (and fortunately they seem to believe that producing a great product is the right way to do that). They aren't going to intentionally do things that reduce their profits.
Don't forget that Apple has already been down the road of licensing the OS. It nearly killed them. People starting buying Power Computing machines because they ran Mac OS as well or better than Apple hardware, and significantly cut into their sales -- sure they were getting OS license fees, but at the same time it was causing Apple's market share to plumet. Even though between Apple and Power Computing the Mac OS market share was growing, the press saw Apple's market share going down and started sounding the death knells. This helped convince developers and consumers that Apple was irrelevant and (combined with many other factors, including increasing quality of Windows) they were in real trouble. It finally took Microsoft making a deal with Apple to keep producing Office for the next 5 years to reduce the hemoraging enough for a turnaround (which started with killing the licensing and bring out the iMac).
There are some differences today, Apple is hip because of the iPod and OS X, but it would still be a really tough battle to get to the point where OS X licenses replaced the lost revenue from hardware sales. That not to say that this could never happen, but I would say Apple would have to have 10%+ market share and growing before it would be worth the risk.
You forgot to include people who buy a PC in that category. That's most of the copies of windows, and the overwhelming majority of those are legit.
You're obviously not speaking from hands on knowledge. People always say that Apple ignores backward compatibility and MS's problems are from it's insistance on providing backward compatibility, but this isn't necessarily true for either one. When Apple switched to the PPC platform almost all 68K programs ran without any problems and often saw an improvement in speed despite running in emulation. When Apple switched to OS X most OS 7/8/9 software continued to run without problems (and even some software going back to the 80's still worked.) Apple waited 3 years before having Macs that couldn't boot OS 9 directly and 5 years to stop pre-installing Classic on new Macs, but still support it under 10.4. When I upgraded my Win98 machine to 2K most of my games that were one or more years old couldn't be played and while I don't own either XBox, but from what I've been reading MS's support for XBox games on the 360 is hit or miss.
With Apple's switch to Intel the PPC Macs will still be supported under the next OS expected to be coming in December/January which is another 18-24 months of direct support plus 18-24 months security updates after the next-next OS has been released. People buying the Intel Macs are able to run most PPC programs under Rosetta while waiting for the programmers to release universal binary versions.
Unlike PC manufacturers, Apple tends to support new technologies first and drop legacy hardware sooner, but they can still be used as add-on cards or through USB/Firewire.