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For Boot Camp Users, New Macs Require Windows 8 Or Newer
For anyone using Windows 7 by way of Apple's Boot Camp utility, beware: support for Windows via Boot Camp remains, but for the newest Apple laptops, it's only for Windows 8 for now. From Slashgear:
This applies to the 2015 MacBook Air, and the 13-inch model of the 2015 MacBook Pro. Windows 8 will remain compatible, as will the forthcoming Windows 10. The 2013 Mac Pro also dropped Boot Camp support for Windows 7, while 2014 iMacs are still compatible, along with 2014 MacBook Airs and 2014 MacBook Pros.
For those who still prefer to run Windows 7 on their Macs, there are other options. This change to Boot Camp will not affect using the Microsoft operating system through virtualization software, such as Parallels and VMware Fusion. Also at PC Mag.
I've always been curious if there is ever going to be a clean way of running straight windows on a macbook air (ideally Windows 10).
The air form factor is fantastic and really is actually cost competitive with what others put out when compared to quality (apple does have volume) despite all those who say you can get a macbook air equivalent PC for $300, I've never found one that works right.
For work reasons though I'm stuck with windows... so I'd love to skip the whole bootcamp thing entirely... but still need the drivers..
This story will apply to not just Apple laptops, but quite a few new laptops going forward. For hardware (including drivers for all the devices built into the motherboard) it makes economic sense to build and test new drivers that are Windows 7 compatible since there is a large pool of people using Windows 7 on desktops that may buy the hardware as an upgrade. For laptop specific hardware for new laptops there is no upgrade market and all new laptops must be sold with Windows 8.1+. It does not make sense to build and test Windows 7 drivers for these devices since there is no real market to speak of. Be it new Apple laptops or other manufactures laptops, new hardware for laptops just will not have the drivers. Just testing a new driver costs millions of dollars. Apple has dropped Windows 7 support in bootcamp for new hardware. It does not make sense for Apple to invest millions of dollars to write and test drivers for hardware that has no hardware support for Windows 7.
enterprise use is still 7 and most drivers are 7/8 at least from amd / ati / nvidia / intel.
So is apple going out of there way to lock out 7 or just is to lazy to add the 7 drivers as well?
> For anyone using Windows 7 by way of Apple's Boot Camp utility, beware: support for Windows via Boot Camp remains, but for the newest Apple laptops, it's only for Windows 8 for now.
Those sadistic bastards.
Oliver's law of assumed responsibility: If you're seen fixing it, you will be blamed for breaking it.
When has Apple ever cared sweet fuck-all about enterprise?
Oh, come off it. Install something like Classic Shell and an average user will barely know the difference between 7 and 8. I have confirmed this empirically with dozens of users.
Many of us require a full-featured real operating system rather than Microsoft's badly designed program loader. But our jobs require us to run Windows software sometimes. So I run Windows in a vm, no reason to that crippled crapware to monopolize my hardware
I love how Mac and Linux users are constantly trying to figure out ways to make their computers run Windows applications, if not Windows itself.
Why not just run Windows, period?
If you could flip a switch and turn your commuter car into a truck to haul a couch home, why WOULDN'T you?
Take your Us vs. Them ONE OS stuff back to the 90's please. We have computers coming out our butts now, and more platforms, more competition, is welcome.
So is apple going out of there way to lock out 7 or just is to lazy to add the 7 drivers as well?
If those are the only two choices, then it's that they're too lazy. This isn't the first new model to lack Windows 7 support via Boot Camp. It's the third. It's actually kinda strange that this one is getting so much publicity, since they've been slowly dropping it with new hardware releases for over a year now.
There's really not much wrong with windows 8. It's not as bad as people make it out to be, and the search feature works quite well for running applications - much the same way quicksilver on a mac would work.
The "Angry" people are generally the ones that are completely lost if you take away the start menu. Personally I never used it in the first place so it didn't bother me.
BeauHD. Worst editor since kdawson.
ha!
my last gig was at cisco. you would not BELIEVE the amount of silver aluminum laptops that you see walking around the san jose (and world wide) campuses. half, maybe more than half of the employees! and I've heard more and more bay area companies are allowing their employees to select mac or win7 (sadly, linux is still rare for corp world). and some companies are almost entirely mac. a friend of mine was lamenting that all of his group and co-workers use macs and so he was 'forced' to use one as his main system at work. he grew to like it, but he would have picked a pc instead.
when I saw international interns (a ton of them at cisco) almost 95% (just a WAG) were with the silver laptops. it would only be the very odd one out that was using a lenovo or some other brand. I took some classes with the interns and the sea of aluminum on the edu-center classrooms was amazing.
at least in the bay area, apple is a HUGE thing. not sure when it happened, but it has happened.
I don't love mac stuff and I still prefer native linux on my systems, but I'm seeing a lot of mac stuff now in very mainstream corp america.
--
"It is now safe to switch off your computer."
Traditionally, "Bootcamp" has been a conglomeration of two separate things:
1) A compatibility module residing in the system firmware (an EFI module) that provided the ability to boot legacy MBR-based operating systems
2) A set of drivers packaged by Apple that was more or less guaranteed to install all required drivers for your system
The CSM (compatibility module) was recently depreciated and removed from the 2013 Mac Pro, and now several of their laptops as well. That is because Windows 8 (or newer) is capable of booting directly from EFI without the compatibility layer in-between (and therefore an MBR partition).
As far as I know, Apple isn't really even providing driver packages anymore since these operating systems generally support the Macintosh hardware OOTB. This had happened before as well, certain systems like the MacPro1,1 were capable of running Windows 7 or newer (even though Apple didn't list support for those)- you just had to go out and find the drivers yourself, which was fairly easy since nothing in that machine was really proprietary.
So really, the story should be that Bootcamp has been removed from these Macintosh systems, because it no longer exists. There's no more CSM for booting legacy operating systems and the drivers mostly work OOTB. The recent versions of Windows are capable of booting directly on the machine WITHOUT "Bootcamp".
You cared enough to type four sentences on your tedious rant.
I thought these arguments disappeared in the early noughties, but clearly there are those that want to wallow in nostalgia. While I've always lived in the Apple/Mac world, I've never been one to indulge in this, even when it was slightly fashionable, which it most certainly isn't these days. However, I've had reason to engage with numerous Windows computers this week for the first time in ages, over a range of versions from XP to 8, and I have to say that in every case it was a reminder that even now, fifteen years on from when those arguments raged, it still sucks. My assumption has been for the last, ooh, eight years-ish, that basically there was no argument, the differences were just quirks and it was whatever you're used to, and for the price you pay extra to be on the Mac side of things, it wasn't worth it. Maybe that's true for a lot of people, but the frustration, general bad temper inducing, sheer passive-aggressive baulkiness of the damn thing made me very glad I don't have to deal with it regularly. And that whatever I pay extra, if I do (meh, my company pays for my hardware, so I don't give a shit how much it costs, personally), is worth every single penny.
Point is, a lot of people like Windows for some reason, and lots of other people like Apple stuff, for some reason. Maybe there will never be much understanding either way, but the silly finger-pointing name-calling from one camp to the other is childish, tribal and idiotic. No matter how sincerely the sentiment is meant.
I have used VMware and not had an issue with networking - I can configure it many different ways.... the preferred way is just making it on the same network as the main computer (so if I use 10.1.1.11 for OS X, I use 10.1.1.12 for Windows). As far as bare metal, that might be the case if you were gaming -- or -- a database (though I run an oracle database in my vmware)..... but if you are actually needing bare-metal for gaming - I would recommend getting a computer that is specialized (with better gaming hardware) than a mac. Personally, I multi-task and booting solely into Windows would be extremely annoying to me.
I've been virtualising Windows environments for years & you're clearly ignorant. Using bridge mode is child's play on both Parallels & VMWare Fusion.
The only thing that's difficult is disabling the use of network interfaces entirely in the Host OS while still making them available for bridge mode in the VM clients & that's a rare need.
Democracy is a sheep and two wolves deciding what to have for lunch. Freedom is a well armed sheep contesting the issue
It sounds more like you're bitter that you are stuck with 6 year old hardware. 10.6.8 sucks, and XP was an abomination.
I bet you want $4 AAPL shares so you can actually afford to buy one.
What are you talking about Windows 7, XP, and Snow leopard are the best operating systems ever made back when software was good in 2009. Before low quality, agile release every week buggy, and flat low color became cool.
http://saveie6.com/
It's a lot easier now than it was in the past, but all you need to do avoid legacy boot.
And that's what happened here - Apple stopped supporting legacy boot.
Instead, it's UEFI firmware does a UEFI boot, which has been supported in Linux for ages (at least to Ubuntu 8.04 or earlier).
And you need to think EFI boot.
Once you do that, it's easy. In fact, there are so many tutorials on installing Linux on Macs that I think you didn't google at all.
Anyhow, first thing first, you need to overwrite the Mac EFI boot manager - the one that gives you that nice startup disc selection. It's just an EFI application. Use something like rEFIt and you're done. It's just a more sophisticated boot manager.
From there, use rEFIt to boot your EFI-based OS. Like Linux (you know how on the CD it has that "BOOT/EFI" directory? Bingo).
In fact, Windows 7 can EFI boot - it has EFI support right there. Many laptops that come with Windows 7 use EFI mode rather than legacy boot, which is a huge PITA if you try to reinstall.
Of course, it's only a matter of time before someone re-writes the compatibility module so you can boot the EFI application to do a legacy boot.
Until you go into Windows Update, or many of the myriad things that have been changed to run in a POS full-screen mode for no f***ing reason.
Under the covers, Windows 8 is arguably superior to Windows 7 in many ways, such as performance, account syncing, improved multi-monitor support, storage pools, etc. I'd have to give equal marks to stability simply because it's hard to get better than "never crashing". I've actually never seen Windows Vista or Windows 7 crash (except for a case of bad RAM). It's just that they really screwed up the UX in Windows 8, making the mouse + keyboard user without a touch interface a second-class citizen.
I also don't think it's acceptable have to install third-party shells that hook into the guts of Windows with all sorts of undocumented APIs (meaning you have no real idea what it will do to security or stability of the system), essentially giving MS a pass for screwing it up in the first place.
So, no, it's not a terrible OS by any means. I just feel that it's worse than Windows 7.
Irony: Agile development has too much intertia to be abandoned now.
Also, despite the whining, it is a fine OS. It's only real issue is the start screen is inefficient to us. Not impossible, not insurmountable, just inefficient. You can use a system with it just fine. What's more, it is a real easy problem to fix. Buy Start 8, or get Classic Shell for free and you're done, a classic start menu that works nice.
When I first saw this topic my gut reaction was "Those bastards!" and then I remembered I've been running Win 8 for the last year on a Surface Pro with Classic Shell without any major annoyances other than some of the built-in stuff that Classic Shell doesn't change.
And then I started thinking, where would MS be if they hadn't fucked with the UI on Win8? That seems to be their biggest problem, not the OS changes itself.
Developing complex drivers can cost millions, but the testing isn't nearly as costly. Much of it is automated. Do you think that Intel, AMD and Nvidia spend millions of dollars a month just on testing?
No, they just release them as betas and wait for the bug reports to roll in. Why pay for testers if so many people will test for you for free?
I started writing this post going for funny, but this actually sounds pretty insightful.
I've worked with one of these, and it is very sweet. Honest PC alternative to a Macbook. I'm no fanboi (I use both platforms), but PC laptops have been flimsy plastic throwaway junk for years, whereas apple builds reliable, solid, throw-it-in-the-bag and go with no McAfee crapware to deal with. The Dell comes with a little McAfee crapware to uninstall, but in every other respect it is the first decent PC laptop I've seen in a long while.
Quality costs. The XPS with 8.1 non-Pro, 8GB RAM, the lower-resolution, non-touch screen, and a decent-size 256 GB SSD (upgrade) will run you $1099 (the "retina" touch-capable screen costs another $300). By comparison, a 13" Air with the same storage, RAM, and non-retina screen (and a slightly faster processor) is $1299.
The XPS 13 feels solid, stupid lightweight, really fast, long battery life, and the non-retina screen looks great (can't vouch for the higher-res screen, but I've heard mixed reviews of Windows 8 scaling up). And it's an actual "lap" top - it don't need no kickstand to hold the screen up. Here's a good review. I would really like to see more PC's built like this.
Take it easy, Charlie, I've got an Angle...
It's a bit more than that. I'm no Windows hater. I just really like and work with Windows 7, and I don't like what Windows 8 and onward needlessly take away.
If the only PC I had to worry about was my own, than I'd be more ok with undo'ing all the stupid things that Windows 8+ did with the interface, ClassicShell, Window Blinds, whatever. But at work that's not an option. IT has a reasonable interest in keeping things supported and uniform, and adding and supporting tons of third-party interface stuff is something they just don't want to do. So the staff just have to live with this crappy interface stuff (ribbons, non-expected full-screen metro apps, charms popping up unexpectedly, buttons in the wrong places, colors that draw your attention to the wrong place) that, honest-to-god, slows down their productivity. Some staff don't love learning new PC stuff, they just want to get work done. Why the fuck did Microsoft change all this shit when there was no reason to?
I appreciate that Windows 8 is better under the hood, boots fast, and is mostly compatible (*cough* Adobe *cough*). But my staff and I spend our working lives on the desktop, and Microsoft just up and made things ugly and force everyone to drink it like Victory Gin. Particularly, they take away the means to customize the interface to something more 7-like. If they at least left the option to customize things up beyond what the lame "personalize" control can do so you don't have to rely on third-party hacks and unsigned system files, it wouldn't suck so bad.
That's why it doesn't take a Windows hater to hate Windows 8. I'm testing Windows 10 preview, and it's better 'cause there's no start screen or charms, but man the desktop and icons are getting more ugly with each new build, like they're time-warping back to the late 80's when 16 colors was all you had. WTF!
Take it easy, Charlie, I've got an Angle...