Windows on a Mac: Intel Freezes Over

When I first saw "Boot Camp", in which Apple will officially support running Microsoft Windows on a Mac, I felt ill. The thought of that OS on a beautiful Mac made me feel queasy, and I had to lie down. A coworker saying "so, Apple's getting into the clone market, huh?" didn't help my general level of nausea.

But then I realized that now my oath to never buy a computer other than Apple was clinched, even if I have to use Windows for work! Also, the possibility of having the company buy me a Mac for my next computer started to open up.

So I was already feeling better, and then I read Daring Fireball's Windows: The New Classic ("Classic" as in the Mac OS 8/9 "Classic Environment", not in the dictionary meaning of the word).

This is a move of supreme confidence — Apple relishes the comparison between Mac OS X and Windows XP, and Microsoft has shown enough of Vista via its widely-available beta seeds that Apple quite obviously isn’t afraid of that comparison, either.

Windows is so ubiquitous that the vast majority of Mac users are already quite familiar with it; I see no chance that Boot Camp is going to cause any Mac users to realize that they’ve been missing out on something better. But from the other side, Apple is confident that most Windows users who give Mac OS X a shot are going to prefer it — again, much in the same way that most long-time Mac users preferred Mac OS X to the old Mac OS.

So this is it, Windows people. Get ready - your next computer should be a Mac.

This software is still "beta", but it will be included in the next version of Mac OS X, 10.5 ("Leopard"). You can buy a Mac Mini for $600, and soon the iBook laptops will have Intel processors in them, too. I believe that once you go Mac, you'll never go back, but having this dual-boot ability is a nice piece-of-mind insurance policy to have. It is possible to have a computer that you not only don't hate, but that you love. Trust me on this one. Have I ever steered you wrong?