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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.
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.
In my experience the Surface Pro tablets cost more because the price they list doesn't include the keyboard, which it alone is anywhere from $150 to $200.
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?
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.
The base $799 model also comes with less SSD space and a slower processor. That may or may not matter for you, but is worth looking at. For me 64GB of space (what the entry-level Surface Pro 3 has) is getting to be tight.
To get a rough spec equivalent to the MacBook Air, which comes with an i5 CPU, 128GB SSD, and a keyboard, you have to spend about $1100 on the Surface Pro 3, which is a bit pricier than the $899 MacBook Air.
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
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.