Slashdot Mirror
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."
Ok I just read the article, "there is strong possibility that Apple's boot manager software, allowing to use Windows and Mac OS X in dual boot mode will be sold for $29 to Tiger users." How will they do this when we *already* have bootcamp?
My little Linux and tech blog
Although this is still speculation, I wouldn't be surprised given what happened with the 802.11n upgrade. But, I would be willing to bet that Boot Camp will be free as part of Leopard. Sort of how the 802.11n upgrade is "free" if you buy the n-compatible Airport.
BootCamp is currently a beta. Apple would charge for the release version.
Well. I guess most users will want to upgrade to Leopard (isn't that why some use the mac instead of XP/Vista/Ubuntu, the OS itself?). If you don't want to, 29$ looks like a fair price (and you can stick with the beta version afaik if you don't want to shell out money at all).
;-).
There are now great alternatives. Boot Camp, Parallels, CrossOverMac, Wine. Competition is great (even if cooperation is better
Animoog.org
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.
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.
$diff terrorists hippies
$
$rm -rf *terrorists *hippies
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.
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.
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?
We already know that BootCamp will be part of Leopard. This article is about Apple allowing Tiger users to buy the Leopard version of BootCamp (as opposed to the betas that have been released thus far) for $30.
This space intentionally left blank.
Just to make something clear that is not so clear in the summary: Boot Camp is included with Leopard, it is free with Leopard. It is BETA on Tiger, and if you wish to use the supported final Boot Camp on Tiger after Leopard is released, you will have to pay.
This is an inducement to upgrade. If they let you just keep BootCamp for free, without wrapping it up in something else you paid for, then the SOX fairy would surely turn them into a pumpkin.
I hope every lobbyist is working overtime to fix this damn GAAP rule. It makes sense on paper, but the implementation is "Retarded".
Don't blame me, I voted for Baltar.
Sub-point release?
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Apple doesn't care, full Bootcamp will be part of Leopard (for "free"), this is just a boon to the few users who don't want to get Leopard but want a non-beta bootcamp in the end.
They already did it with iChat AV (OSX 10.3 included iChat AV, you had to pay $29 to get it on 10.2) and with the 802.11n update (will be available with the 802.11n Airport, should be included in Leopard, $29 if you stick to Tiger without getting the 802.11n Airport Extreme)
Most people will buy Leopard anyway.
"The way we can tell it's C# instead of Haskell is because it's nine lines instead of two." -- wadler
Inconsequential. Dual booting is *so* 2005.
Nobody even turns off their macs anymore, much less boots into a different OS.
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
It's probably not a driver thing, it's most likely an EFI thing. Booting is done differently since the current line of Apple hardware uses EFI instead of BIOS, so GRUB (etc) probably isn't compatible. 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).
Mind you, I still think it's a lame cash grab, but I figure that Leopard will include the full version at no extra cost so it won't affect future switchers anyways. When I tested out the current beta version, it worked fine, other than the fact that Parallels was much more useful and it meant having a Windows installation on my MBP. In either case, I needed the hard drive space back. I wonder if they'll put this down to the S-O Act too...
How are sites slashdotted when nobody reads TFAs?
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.
+++ UGUCAUCGUAUUUCU
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
They're working on that.
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 shortens FAT32 partitions. Linux had it in 1999.
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.
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.
Charge for undocumented, unsupported software? Who do they think they are, Microsoft?
But really, I see this as a good thing. If they are going to release it as a full retail release with documentation and actual support, then by all means put a price tag on it. It will only take one half hour phone call to support to burn through the $30 retail price, and in the scope of things the price vs additional functionality you will get from a Mac is a mind bending proposition.
Glonoinha the MebiByte Slayer
Apple confirmed the 802.11n fee at being $1.99.
You can in fact do WINE for free, it's been supported on OS X since sometime in the 0.9.2x versions. However, you are correct that you don't get any of the helper stuff (you pretty much have to figure out how to launch your app using command-line WINE), and compatibility isn't as good as CrossOver -- there's no Direct3D support at all, as far as I can see. Of course, you don't get the same user support that Codeweavers gives you either. Plus you have to compile it yourself (meaning you need the dev tools installed), since there's no installer package yet. I just have it installed for the PokerStars client, but for someone who needed more extensive support or was running a mission-critical app, Crossover Mac is probably well worth it.
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.
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?
"This is great. It will encourage more people to move to Leopard at a faster rate.
More revenue for Apple. More profits for Apple. More Macs for us to buy. Yea!"
This is a comment on the site. Most illuminating, people who do not know the difference between their own interests and that of other people.
Hardly know where to begin....
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.
09 F9 11 02 9D 74 E3 5B D8 41 56 C5 63 56 88 C0 is the magic number.
While Apple does put out great products.. please dont think you are giving your money to the good guys. They are every bit as altruistic as Microsoft.
You completely missed my point. I'm NOT buying their products because "I want to give my money to the good guys" or any such philosophical or idealistic bullshit.
I buy their products because at the end of the day, they just work. It's not just a marketing slogan. I can sit and relax on my couch and not fight with my computer.
That's all it is. I don't care about their philosophy, or revolutionary upgrades. I just want a computer that does what I want, when I want, without irritating me.
All I care about is the quality. And I'm willing to pay for it. And people like me are Apple's target demographic. That was my point.
A street-corner hooker is significantly cheaper than a high-class escort.
$2B OR NOT $2B = $FF
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.
But both will give you syphilis if you don't wear a condom...
Hmm, mod me insightful if you find a deep meaningful analogy to the OS debate, hidden in the above. I personally could not, but of course I posted anyway.