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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."
I'll believe it when I see it.
"Everything worth innovating today will go to court tomorrow."
Although this is still speculation, I wouldn't be surprised given what happened with the 802.11n upgrade. But, I would be willing to bet that Boot Camp will be free as part of Leopard. Sort of how the 802.11n upgrade is "free" if you buy the n-compatible Airport.
Umm, yes? Because they have already, and it will be an integrated feature of OS X 10.5? And Boot Camp does in fact do what it claims to do, make it very easy to dual boot Windows and Mac OS? It seems like this is mainly something to give people who don't want to pay the full amount to upgrade to Leopard the ability to at least buy the Boot Camp functionality if that's all they care about.
What everyone has right now is a time limited beta, I think, so it will eventually expire. I'm not quite sure how that will work though (i.e. if it will prevent you from accessing the other partition, or just not let you create a new bootable partition, etc.).
I'm not sure I understand the logic. You have Tiger right now, and you are unhappy that they will be charging (or at least possibly charging) for Boot Camp for Tiger, and that is the reason you will not upgrade to 10.5. But 10.5 will have Boot Camp included as part of its featureset, so it would not cost any more or less than what it would if you had been planning on upgrading to 10.5 anyway. So I'm not sure I understand why charging for Boot Camp for Tiger affects your decision to upgrade to 10.5?
Sub-point release?
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
I suppose when you put it like that then the $29 charge to Tiger users is just a sop to Panther users ('look you get a "free" version of bootcamp). Although I understand that Apple wants to keep everyone up to date, an easier solution would be a yearly $50 service charge to keep with the updates and then we can forget the version numbers.
But as I said I do not care too much as the main use of OS X is firmware updates, I boot straight into Linux normally.
My little Linux and tech blog
$50/year for updates when you have to (and will) shell out $130 for your update box?
Dude, Apple's in for they money, why would they offer you a service that would yield them $80 less per year per Mac user?
"The way we can tell it's C# instead of Haskell is because it's nine lines instead of two." -- wadler
Apple is the king of "nickel and dime"ing the user for all it's worth.
Right, because the millions of dollars a month they spend on developing OSX should be coming out of the kindness of their hearts.
There is no longer anything that can be done with computers that is nontrivial and clearly legal. -- Paul Phillips
Why would Apple charge for something that is basically akin to GRUB? Sure, they offer you native drivers for their hardware, but what manufacturer of computer equipment WOULDN'T offer a Microsoft Windows XP driver for their hardware? Other than that, the only thing Bootcamp does is act as a boot manager between OS X and third party X86 operating systems... something LILO has been doing for a decade now. Hell, even OS/2 had a nifty boot manager and so does Windows NT! Get a clue Apple, your reality-distortion-field is fluctuating again.
This is the same company that charges you $10 for the ability to use their media player to play videos at full screen, for crying out loud.
If all you want from QuickTime is full screen, go here. I'm not sure where you're getting $10 from, because QuickTime Pro is $30, and that gets you a lot more than just the ability to play movies full screen.
They charge $130 for incremental OS updates every 12-18 months, which is basically a subscription service.
Wrong. Truly spoken like somebody who doesn't actually know what they're talking about! Don't be fooled by what looks like a change in the minor version number; what you think are "incremental" updates always have a large amount of new features -- it's closer to uprading from Windows 2000 to Windows XP than applying a service pack. Besides, if you don't want the new features, it's not like the older versions of OS X stop working, and they still provide security updates for them.
They're charging $2 to enable the 802.11n hardware that they will ship.
For legal reasons. The Sarbanes-Oxley Act really is that stupid.
Umm... People using Panther on their Mac do not have a "Boot Camp"-compatible Mac
The brains of a chicken, coupled with the claws of two eagles, may well hatch the eggs of our destruction.
Sweet Jesus, they never described BootCamp as anything but a beta technology from their upcoming major OS release. The fact that Tiger users even have the option at any price to continue using it once Leopard is released is more than they ever stated they would do and more than any Tiger user had reason to hope for. I think everyone needs to stop their goddamned whining about it. I fully expected to have to upgrade to use it. I don't know why anyone wouldn't have had that assumption.
You like your Macintosh better than me, don't you Dave? Dave? Can you hear me Dave?
OS updates every 12-18 months
... in 2001 Mac OS X was a relatively new operating system under going rapid concurrent team development and now that it has matured Apple has stated customers should expect major releases every couple of years as the norm.
10.4 -> 10.5 - ~24 months
10.3 -> 10.4 - ~18 months
10.2 -> 10.3 - ~14 months
10.1 -> 10.2 - ~11 months
Notice a trend?
Apple made major releases Mac OS X available relatively often to get newly implemented features out to end customers and developers sooner (a good thing)
Apple will support the current version of Mac OS X and one prior. So in reality customers concerned about the relatively small upgrade fee of $129 (family pack is even a better deal) could skip every other release and hence only purchase an update every 4 years or so (that falls in the Window release time frame and of course the 129 is less then what MS charges). On the time scales of 4 years you also start to get into purchasing new hardware mindset which would get you the latest version of Mac OS X for free.
Why would Apple charge for something that is basically akin to GRUB? Sure, they offer you native drivers for their hardware ... *rolls eyes*
Ok let me know when you have it working and will support customers using it? Surely something less expensive then $29 would win the market
The question is can all users upgrade to Leopard? They may not meet the higher hardware requirements, or may depend on applications that aren't yet supported under Leopard.
Sure, they offer you native drivers for their hardware, but what manufacturer of computer equipment WOULDN'T offer a Microsoft Windows XP driver for their hardware?
Apple.
As is demonstrated by the fact they used PowerPC chips for years, with nary a thought for people wanting to boot windows.
Just my $0.02
"Goodness me, how unlike the FBI to abuse the trust of the American public." -- The Onion
Boot Camp is a feature of Leopard, and a for-pay add-on for Tiger. If Apple isn't in Enterprise now then selling Boot Camp for their old OS isn't going to hurt their play.
It shouldn't be. Apple did mention when they released BootCamp that the final version may have a charge. They also mentioned that there was a possibility that they would never release a final version. BootCamp beta was an experiment, obviously they got good results; and I think that has a lot to do with Parallels Desktop.
Both Apple and Parallels efforts to allow both products to co-exist and even work together in some fashion is what put the steam back into Apple's BootCamp efforts. Without it, for a brief period of time, it looked like Mac OS X Leopard would get some BootCamp integration but BootCamp as a separate project/product was dead. Parallels software cost $80 ($79.99), so I think $29 is a pretty good price--assuming that that would be the final price. It's all just rumors now.
Personally, I'll be recommending the Leopard upgrade for any of my clients that want both BootCamp and Parallels running. But, it's nice to know for those who Leopard isn't a strong possibility that BootCamp would officially become an Apple Support product. Something it isn't right now.
The complaint of charging extra to enable included hardware seems like a legitimate one to me.
It's been said, but.
I need Windows for my job, and I refuse to reboot my macbook twice a day into XP and back. I had tried Parallels but was entirely unsatisfied with its performance until I upgraded to 1.25 gigs of RAM. Sweet Jeebus is it cool. Booting XP in a window takes about fifteen seconds from launch to login, automatically recognizes my hardware setup and network connection and does exactly what I need it to while staying the hell out of my way.
BootCamp looks neat, I guess, but really - who the hell restarts their computers anymore?
Spoken like someone who gets their news from Slashdot, zealously uses and advocates Linux, and doesn't own a Mac.
Their OS releases are not 'updates', they bring significant new functionality while evolving an already great code base. They only APPEAR to be 'incremental' because of their versioning scheme, but each release packs in more upgrade than any corresponding major version upgrade of windows.
And you have to also bear in mind that Apple's target demographic doesn't give a crap about a few bucks here and there. They're not after YOU, they're not trying to capture the low end $500 dell market, or the "build your own and run Linux" market, nor are they trying to capture the "$3000 gaming rig j00 g0t pwned" market.
They're after the upper middle demographic who has money to burn and wants quality at any price. People who aren't going to feel nickeled and dimed over 30 bucks. People who are far more interested in getting reliable quality stuff than saving a few bucks.
I would not call myself a fanboy, I just really like my Mac. (But I'm not trying to have sex with it, like this guy.) It's my "I'm home from work, not the network admin anymore today, and just not going to have a fight with my computer tonight" machine. I bought it because I wanted something less aggravating than windows, at any price. This is exactly the same reason why I sleep on a Tempurpedic and drive a BMW... quality and reliability are more important to me than paying a little more.
People like me are Apple's target demographic, and we just don't think they're being at all unreasonable about their pricing for the quality of product that they put out. Especially compared to all the other total shit hardware and software out there.
it's not reading the date that's hard, it's verifying that the date given is true, and not user-set.
Is $29 more or less than buying a PC to test your application on?
Is $29 more or less than buying a new desk to hold your new computer?
Is $29 more or less than your hourly rate?
And surely 30 bucks is better than 500 or 600 for a whole other computer.
Have you ever considered piracy? You'd make a wonderful Dread Pirate Roberts.
Why not just get Office for OSX? Granted, it doesn't have Outlook (it has Entourage instead), but that's not necessarily a bad thing...
GLaDOS for President 2016! "Well here we are again. It's always such a pleasure." -- GLaDOS, 2011
Except IE is software that's available to download freely whether or not you bought anything from MS or not, which is quite different in terms of the Sarbanes-Oxley law and 802.11n where you already bought hardware previously that is now receiving new functionality not previously advertised.
Errm... no. Did you miss the "this is an add-on to Microsoft Windows XP, you have no right to use it except on a properly licensed copy of XP" clause in the license? Not to mention the use of WGA to stop anyone from downloading and installing it on anything but a validated copy of XP...
Hmm. Well, I'm not sure what benefits, if any, bootcamp (free or at $30) offers over Parallels at $60; while I am quite certain of a very long (and quite relevant to me) list of advantages Parallels has over bootcamp.
So I guess this is about as much news as changes to Safari — because I don't use that either. Once I tried Omniweb, I basically never had a reason to go back. It kicks Safari's butt right off the face of the planet, particularly in the area of tab features and controlling how individual web sites are allowed to act.
I sure wish Apple would concentrate on fixing the basics instead of duplicating functionality available in far more sophisticated forms from third parties; for instance, the Terminal's character addressing modes haven't been working 100% for the last three years, the system-wide implementation of function keys is a disaster, the single button on laptops is insufficient to the task of dealing with the full range of two button operations any windows laptop can pull off (and yes, I know all about the two finger emulation... try a right button drag and let me know how that works out for you) and why, on a laptop wider than my PC's keyboard, can't Apple be bothered to put a numeric pad? And why on a dual core, high speed laptop, running what is nominally supposed to be a modern multitasking OS, do I *ever* see that *&^&$^$ beachball when doing I/O? And why can't I refresh a network share?
I'm a huge Apple fan, really I am, but it just seems to me that they could do better - and bootcamp doesn't appear to be worth the time they are spending on it. Maybe I'm missing something. Why - anyone - is bootcamp better than Parallels? I'm booting linux, win98, winxp all in windows on my laptop using Parallels. Concurrently. They run great. What would using bootcamp gain me? I mean, besides losing the incredible convenience of OSX running alongside those other OS's, and vice-versa?
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.
Why is it that the Mac cultists always support ANYTHING Jobs and Co. do, but down on MS. I mean, if MS were to do this, people would be up in arms! "Charging for something we have free already? Come on! This should be FREE to all users! They just want more money!" Apple's basically pulling an MS and Mac people are going "Sure, it costs a little more, but what doesn't? :)"
Just pointing out the massive hypocrisy here, and I'll probably get modded down for it by rabid fanboys, but I can't ignore the massive hypocrisy here.
I have no idea what kinds of features Apple's recent upgrades offer, but I have a hard time believing that they are worth $150 a pop. Heck, after 5 updates to OSX, you've shelled out around $750, nearly five times the cost of upgrading XP to Vista Home Premium (what most home users will go for).
I was unaware that 3*$129=$750.