Apple to Charge for Boot Camp?

An anonymous reader writes "According to a report MacScoop has obtained, Apple will charge current users of Mac OS X Tiger for the final version of Boot Camp that will be released at the same time as Mac OS X Leopard, this Spring."

Comments

Re:Looks like I'll stay with Tiger then

[SachiCALaw]

BootCamp is currently a beta. Apple would charge for the release version.

Re:Looks like I'll stay with Tiger then

[Bastardchyld]

Its because they are selling the final version. This no different than any other public beta. No one expects Microsoft to offer the final version of Vista for free because there was a free public beta.

Nothing to see here.

Just like iChat

[Finque]

This is nothing new from Apple. I believe when iChat AV came out with Panther (10.3), users of Jaguar (10.2) could upgrade to it for $29. Apple wants you to buy the latest OS from them, but for certain things (iChat, now maybe BootCamp) you can purchase them separately for a previous OS.

Yeah and you expected?

[shawnce]

Apple stated all along the Boot Camp would ship with Mac OS X 10.5 (aka you buy 10.5 you also get Boot Camp). So this left open the question if you would be able to purchase Boot Camp (the final version) for 10.4 or not. This rumors implies that 10.4 users will have the ability to use the release version of Boot Camp... which is a good thing. It was never really likely that Boot Camp would be free for 10.4 users.

For those only having a few Win32 applications...

[(H)elix1]

Check out(http://www.codeweavers.com/products/cxmac) Crossover for OSX. Just a commercial version of WINE, but for the $40-60 I can run office 2k without having to put a Win32 OS on the machine. It feels like it launches a hidden copy of the OS for each application under the covers, so I stay in OSX with my win32 apps running along side the Mac ones. Not a dual OS boot like boot camp, not a vmware OS in a OS like parallels. Just another option. I suspect you could do WINE for free, but the helper stuff was well worth the money, IMHO.

Re:What is the difference between Boot Camp and GR

[battery111]

Well, actually a lot of things. Boot camp isn't simply a bootloader, it is a packaged solution. Upon first running bootcamp, it has you do a destructionless partition on your HD in order to hold windows (if you don't already have a windows part). Then it burns a cd with all the drivers you will need for your mac hardware once windows is installed and looking for drivers for these things. Now yes, it also doeds include a bootloader, but it is designed to be a more "plug and play" solution than having to find and download the individual programs that would do these things, and configure them properly. Just more of a "mac-like" experience.

Re:Define Vista then...

[bsane]

Apple tends to lock 10.2 from running new software, and you bet your ass they'll lock 10.3

Apple isn't restricting what you can do with 10.2 or 10.3, the problem is that each new release has included a major new api or toolkit (CoreData comes to mind in 10.4). If developers take advantage of the new features then their apps won't run on previous versions.

Re:Same shit different day

[kalidasa]

Do you know what the version number is of Windows XP? It's Windows NT 5.1. Care to guess what the version number was of Windows 2000? Windows NT 5.0.

Re:Looks like I'll stay with Tiger then

[hammock]

That, and the live partitioning without destroying data that's currently on the drive, which I've never seen before (though I haven't dabbled in the Linuxes in a while).

# FIPS
# GNU Parted
# Partition Magic (bought out by Symantec and discontinued)
# Paragon Partition Manager
# Acronis Disk Director Suite

Some of these have been out for quite a long time.

Re:Not til they fix it...

[sokoban]

Sorry, but I'm not paying a cent for Bootcamp til they make it work 100%. Okay, then I won't charge you for the Bootcamp Beta. Though if you want to post your credit card number, expiration date, name, and security code, I'll gladly take them. Also, if you only run software that works 100% do you mostly run software written in HAL/S?

For a bunch of guys that brag about how much better their product is than Windows, they certainly code their Windows-based stuff poorly. Apple doesn't have a lot of experience coding for their competitors' platforms. Strange, isn't it.

Itunes on Windows uses more juice than nearly every other application I run. Your computer runs off juice? What kind is it, Apple or Orange?

Back to Bootcamp... it took almost a solid year for them to release a build of the Windows drivers that actually made use of all of the system's hardware... until then, the two-finger trackpad drag didn't work (and it's still sub-par to the responsiveness of the OSX drivers)... Okay, and every company that sells PCs with Windows preloaded ships drivers that work well? If you're this up in arms about Apple shipping beta Windows XP drivers that don't work as well as their OS X counterparts, what do you think about the actual final version drivers that are shipped preloaded on Windows based computers?

opening the onboard camera blew the OS up... And I bet it splashed juice everywhere.

Even now, running the latest code, when you bring Windows back from hibernate on a Macbook, the trackpad doesn't work at all and a reboot is required to bring it back. It's been tolerable because it's a beta, but put a price tag on it and we have a different situation. They're going to have to put a lot more effort into making a quality product if they want us to shell out for it. So, in order to sell a piece of software, it should have less bugs than the free beta version. That should be modded: (+liek infinity, Insightful)