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OS X Businesses Operating Systems The Almighty Buck Apple

Apple to Charge for Boot Camp? 501

Posted by CmdrTaco from the now-wait-a-minute dept.
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."
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Apple to Charge for Boot Camp? More

Apple to Charge for Boot Camp?

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  • Uh.... (Score:4, Insightful)

    by AWhiteFlame ( 928642 ) on Sunday January 21, 2007 @11:18AM (#17702462) Homepage
    I'll believe it when I see it.
  • 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 ;-).

    • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

      by arth1 ( 260657 )
      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).

      The question is can all users upgrade to Leopard? They may not meet the higher hardware requirements, or may depend on applications that aren't yet supported under Leopard.

      • Re: (Score:3, Informative)

        by Anonymous Coward
        If you can run BootCamp (i.e. you have an Intel Mac) then you will meet the requirements for Leopard out of the box. Apple froze the APIs in 10.4 so I suspect that there will not be huge incompatibilities with existing applications, either. Leopard does add numerous new features and APIs, so developers will definitely want to enhance their apps for 10.5, but it won't be required.
  • Damn accountants.

  • The reason given will no doubt be (Score:3, Informative)

    by Hawthorne01 ( 575586 ) on Sunday January 21, 2007 @11:24AM (#17702510)
    Sarbanes-Oaxley compliance. Again. FWIW, I have Boot Camp on this very machine. It's worth an addtional 30 bills, if for no other reason than it opens up the world of Windows gaming to me yet again. If some of the Wine-based alternatives for OS X pan out, then I'll drop Boot Camp. Until then...
    • Why would it be Sarbanes-Oaxley compliance? They've been quite open (and made a few ads) about being able to run Windows on Mac. They didn't release that the cards were actually 802.11n, which is why they have to charge to make them such. It's not the same situation.

  • Just like iChat (Score:5, Informative)

    by Finque ( 653377 ) on Sunday January 21, 2007 @11:24AM (#17702522)
    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.

  • Yeah and you expected? (Score:5, Informative)

    by shawnce ( 146129 ) on Sunday January 21, 2007 @11:26AM (#17702528) Homepage
    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.

  • Dual Booting? (Score:3, Funny)

    by jaymzru ( 1005177 ) on Sunday January 21, 2007 @11:43AM (#17702664)
    Inconsequential. Dual booting is *so* 2005.
    Nobody even turns off their macs anymore, much less boots into a different OS.
  • Sorry, but I'm not paying a cent for Bootcamp til they make it work 100%. For a bunch of guys that brag about how much better their product is than Windows, they certainly code their Windows-based stuff poorly. Itunes on Windows uses more juice than nearly every other application I run.

    Back to Bootcamp... it took almost a solid year for them to release a build of the Windows drivers that actually made use of all of the system's hardware... until then, the two-finger trackpad drag didn't work (and it's st
    • I thought the process of working out the bugs is what beta-labeled software is for. You and I should expect all the major issues to be worked out by the time it hits gold.

    • Re:Not til they fix it... (Score:5, Informative)

      by sokoban ( 142301 ) on Sunday January 21, 2007 @03:13PM (#17704336) Homepage

      Sorry, but I'm not paying a cent for Bootcamp til they make it work 100%.
      Okay, then I won't charge you for the Bootcamp Beta. Though if you want to post your credit card number, expiration date, name, and security code, I'll gladly take them. Also, if you only run software that works 100% do you mostly run software written in HAL/S?

      For a bunch of guys that brag about how much better their product is than Windows, they certainly code their Windows-based stuff poorly.
      Apple doesn't have a lot of experience coding for their competitors' platforms. Strange, isn't it.

      Itunes on Windows uses more juice than nearly every other application I run.
      Your computer runs off juice? What kind is it, Apple or Orange?

      Back to Bootcamp... it took almost a solid year for them to release a build of the Windows drivers that actually made use of all of the system's hardware... until then, the two-finger trackpad drag didn't work (and it's still sub-par to the responsiveness of the OSX drivers)...
      Okay, and every company that sells PCs with Windows preloaded ships drivers that work well? If you're this up in arms about Apple shipping beta Windows XP drivers that don't work as well as their OS X counterparts, what do you think about the actual final version drivers that are shipped preloaded on Windows based computers?

      opening the onboard camera blew the OS up...
      And I bet it splashed juice everywhere.

      Even now, running the latest code, when you bring Windows back from hibernate on a Macbook, the trackpad doesn't work at all and a reboot is required to bring it back. It's been tolerable because it's a beta, but put a price tag on it and we have a different situation. They're going to have to put a lot more effort into making a quality product if they want us to shell out for it.
      So, in order to sell a piece of software, it should have less bugs than the free beta version. That should be modded: (+liek infinity, Insightful)

  • What is the difference between Boot Camp and GRUB? (Score:3, Interesting)

    by Sporkinum ( 655143 ) on Sunday January 21, 2007 @11:46AM (#17702688)
    Excuse my ignorance to all things Mac, but what is the difference between Boot Camp and GRUB/LILO? Can't GRUB/LILO boot a Mac OS?

    • Re: (Score:3, Informative)

      by Sancho ( 17056 ) *
      Boot Camp actually prepares a Windows disc for you including drivers for Apple's hardware. It also partitions the disk. It's basically an all-in-two solution for adding Windows to your Mac (it's all-in-two because you still need a Windows CD, which you still need if you repartition manually). I don't know if the Windows drivers are available any other way.
    • Intel Macs use EFI instead of the legacy BIOS, so the versions of GRUB and/or LILO shipping with any current Linux distros do not work. GRUB appears to have partial EFI support working on the Mac Mini and LILO has the elilo fork, but at this point neither have made it in to mainstream distros.

      What Boot Camp does is it provides BIOS emulation so NTLDR, GRUB, and LILO then work unmodified after the Boot Camp loader has already run. The Boot Camp assistant also provides a non-destructive GUI partitioning too
  • 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.

    • Re:For those only having a few Win32 applications. (Score:4, Informative)

      by istewart ( 463887 ) on Sunday January 21, 2007 @01:03PM (#17703322)
      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.

    • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

      by VGPowerlord ( 621254 )
      Why not just get Office for OSX? Granted, it doesn't have Outlook (it has Entourage instead), but that's not necessarily a bad thing...
  • Apple really needs to wise-up. Information Week published recently (it'll be online next week I guess) that Apple is gearing up once more for a run at the enterprise again. They really need to take a play from Microsoft's book -- Give some stuff away to get yourself better leverage.

    Bootcamp is good leverage. The parallels thing might be even better. In either case, it's a good way to bridge from Windows to MacOS and they want to make it less appealing to do so???

    Idiots. They over-estimate their value.

  • Dont need it: We need only the BIOS emulation (Score:2, Interesting)

    by Anonymous Coward
    As far as I know Bootcamp is no big deal:
    1) It provides a GUI (not very good and limited, it does not support linux) for resizing the patritions. The actual job is done by DiskUtil, which can be used without installing BootCamp.
    2) It contains a disk image with Apple Win32 drivers (you can extract the image from the BootCamp installer - just search in the package and you'll find the image somewhere - i remember waguely it is in a .pax archive but I am not sure -anyway it is buried somewhere in the installer)

  • parallels (Score:4, Insightful)

    by Triv ( 181010 ) on Sunday January 21, 2007 @01:27PM (#17703518) Journal
    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?

    • Re:parallels (Score:5, Interesting)

      by MadCow42 ( 243108 ) on Sunday January 21, 2007 @02:57PM (#17704214) Homepage
      Add dual monitors to your setup, and you'll REALLY be blown away. I'm running the 24" iMac, with a 17" flat screen hooked up on the side. OSX is running full-screen on the iMac, and W2k is running full-screen on the external flat screen. It's like having to computers for the price of one, with a shared keyboard and mouse. Bootcamp took the risk out of going to Mac, but Parallels made it sweet. I can't give up Windows 100%, so it's there whenever I want it. But truthfully, 95% of what I do is on the Mac only (unless you count running the Windows screensaver).

      MadCow.

  • The weird and wonderful world of the machead (Score:4, Funny)

    by Budenny ( 888916 ) on Sunday January 21, 2007 @01:51PM (#17703664)
    "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....

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