Apple and Microsoft Corp.: strange bedfellows? Hardly. Office remains the dominant office productivity suite on Macs and while Microsoft may not consider Mac users their most loyal adherents, 'the Macintosh Business Unit (MacBU) at Microsoft is the largest, 100 percent, Mac-focused developer of Mac software outside of Apple itself,' said Adam Anger, director, Business and Marketing Organization, Microsoft Hong Kong. 'We have a long-standing history of collaboration with Apple and a continuing commitment to research and development.'
And the MacBU does some fascinating things with Macs (check employee David Weiss's blog'http://davidweiss.blogspot.com/2006/04/tour-of-microsofts-mac-lab.html'for examples).
Now we have Apple allowing an OS from another vendor to run natively on its hardware. But if you want to run XP, why not just buy another box? Interchangeability these days means you could even use the same keyboard, monitor and mouse if you wanted.
'Let me give you a real world example,' wrote Ken Mingis for IDG publication Computerworld (US online). 'My partner is a real estate agent and longtime Mac fan. Two years ago, he had to get rid of his PowerBook G4 because software he needs is specifically coded for Windows XP (and even more horrifying, requires Internet Explorer). He had a choice: Keep doing real estate or keep his laptop. He wound up with a Sony Vaio.'
Wrote Mingis: 'Apple's release of Boot Camp, which allows users of its Intel-based hardware to install Windows XP natively on their computer, now gives him'and the rest of us'the best of both worlds: A stylish Apple computer with a solid operating system that also does Windows. No emulation. No pokey performance.'
'In fact,' wrote Mingis, 'since my MacBook Pro has a Core Duo 2.16GHz processor inside, Windows practically flew. It runs faster than it does on his Vaio. It runs faster than it does on my Vaio...and installation, in true Apple form, was a snap.'
'I now have two computers in one and can run virtually any software out there...the next time a Windows user makes cooing noises about Mac OS X, or praises the design of my MacBook, I can'and I will'promptly fire up XP and suggest that they can have the best of both worlds.'
The 'best of both worlds'? Allowing a single vendor to supply both hardware and software is a double-edged sword.
But in the case of Apple, it can be a plus. When my G5's motherboard blew up last year (note: in my 19 years of owning Macs, this is the ONLY hardware failure I've had), I took it to Apple's Causeway Bay service center for warranty repair. They swapped out the motherboard and returned the machine in short order.
However, suppose I'd been using third-party software, like one of the freeware open-source applications engineered specifically for Mac OS X (note to our handful of Mac-using readers: Mozilla's Camino is a gem of a web-browser). Were Apple a hardware-only vendor, they could conceivably have disclaimed responsibility, saying software they didn't write caused datapanik and fried my G5.
But because Apple makes both the hardware and their software, I could have requested that they return the machine to me in the condition in which they sold it to me'nothing more, nothing less. Everything else, I could have restored from backup. That's single-vendor-theory at its best, and an ace in the hole for those of us who might or might not get excited over iPods but who use Macs as business tools, day in and day out'a userbase that Apple must support regardless of market share, media hype, and stock prices.
Vendors love to yak about 'simplicity,' but stable hardware/software combos with one-year-warranty coverage are about simple as IT gets. For users, it's all about functionality and getting the work done, and when Fortune magazine described OS X as 'a cross between a Porsche and an Abrams tank,' they pretty much nailed it.
Where does Boot Camp fit in? On my machines, it doesn't.