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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
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
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.
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?
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
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'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?
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.