Apple does Windows

Convergence is coming: Last week, Apple Computers released Boot Camp, a program that allows a Macintosh computer to be able to load up Windows on Apple hardware after a reboot. Thus, an Apple user could also have Windows on their machine so they could run Windows programs in Windows itself (as opposed to a slower-than-molasses emulator inside the Macintosh operating system).

Since there are quite a few programs (including most games) unavailable on the Macintosh, this is a pretty big deal, enough so that I could see switching to an Apple in the next few years. A lot of my fellow gamers are saying the same thing. A more attractive computer, a generally less suck operating system, a system with far fewer issues with viruses and spyware … what’s not to like? The only real issue is the relative cost of the hardware and the relative difficulty upgrading. The former isn’t a big issue for gamers, who tend to buy higher end computers anyway, and the latter is only periodically an issue, and only for a relatively small number of users, all things considered.

My family’s first computer was an Apple ][e, which was laughably thought of as a portable computer back in the early 1980s. By “portable,” it’s meant that it was (slightly) heavier than a portable electric typewriter, which was a monster to lug around. (My family had one of those, too.) We had a little green monochrome monitor (later replaced with a fairly substantial color monitor) and my brother and I loved it. We had a little dot-matrix printer and a handful of games. My brother and I used it to write our papers on and my parents finally sold the whole kit and kaboodle after more than a decade of owning it (for something modest, like $50) after my brother and I were in college.

At Virginia Tech, all the engineering students (including my first roommate, Paul Kachurak) had to have IBM PS/2s, which seemed a quantum leap forward in computing power, although I’m pretty sure my Treo 300 phone is more powerful now. But there were programs I had never seen before, much less had access to, and as my college career progressed (with me just mooching the use of others’ computers or working in the campus computer labs), I saw relatively few Macintoshes, and those that I did were clearly falling further and further behind the curve of what was available for them and, due to their higher costs, simply didn’t measure up in most ways to the IBMs. By the time I was living in the fraternity house, the only tangible thing Apple was really contributing to computing (via my roommate Todd Baucom’s computer) was the mouse, although his Windows 3.0 version was using a two-button mouse, something that the folks in Cuppertino would take a decade more to embrace as a notion.

So my computers, starting the summer I graduated college, have been Windows machines. (I was given strict instructions to write the Great American Novel by my parents when they got me that first one. I’m working on it, I swear!) The only time I have used Macintoshes, for the most part, have been chronically underpowered work computers (the nature of work computers anywhere outside the gaming industry, in my experience), which did little to woo me back to the Apple fold.

But now, with the current Macintosh operating system no longer playing catch up with Windows (sorry, Macheads, things like using more than one mouse button and being able to resize a window from anywhere along its frame were innovations ignored for too many years out of a misplaced sense of pride) and the realization that nearly all of the programs I use regularly (Firefox, Thunderbird, Word, iTunes, Photoshop, Dreamweaver, World of Warcraft) are either available for the Mac or run natively on it (World of Warcraft, like all recent Blizzard titles, actually ships on a hybrid disc with both versions on the same disk), my reasons for not going back to Mac are dwindling.

I’m hoping that the commentators on This Week in Tech are right, and that the next version of the Mac OS will actually not require a dual-boot system, but simply automatically run Windows software within the Macintosh OS, using the secondary processor on a dual processor system to run Windows under the hood for just such occasions. If and when that happens, it might be time to kiss goodbye to Microsoft, as I have to most of the rest of their software at this point.

I wonder if I’ll be able to get a nostalgia copy of Ultima III or Swashbuckler to run on it when that happens, as a “welcome home” gift to myself.

4 Comments »

1. I’ve got some windows programs (mostly just accounting software) I’d like to run, so I’m thinking about getting a macmini and a kvm. I’m also curious if the macmini would be fast enough to run City of Heroes or some other nerdifuntimes.

   Comment by f. chong rutherford — April 10, 2006 @ 18:37

2. The mini should be able to handle CoH, but be warned that the video RAM is shared, so you wanna max up the RAM.

   I’m approaching this from the other side of things – I use Macs and would love to have Windows for the occasional game.

   Comment by Morts — April 11, 2006 @ 4:39

3. Have you been following the Penny Arcade gang;s forays into Maclandia? Good stuff.

   And as someone who grew up on Macs, then was exiled to PCs for most of my working life, but has a Mac at home
   and works on a tablet PC at Microsoft, I can tell you I am super-happy at this news. Now if I could only get
   my boss to spring for a Mac here….

   J

   Comment by John — April 11, 2006 @ 8:09

4. More grist for the mill…

   http://www.usatoday.com/tech/products/2006-04-06-boot-camp-primer_x.htm?csp=34

   very interesting stuff.

   J

   Comment by John — April 11, 2006 @ 11:19

RSS feed for comments on this post.

Leave a comment

Line and paragraph breaks automatic, e-mail address never displayed, HTML allowed: <a href="" title=""> <abbr title=""> <acronym title=""> <b> <blockquote cite=""> <cite> <code> <del datetime=""> <em> <i> <q cite=""> <s> <strike> <strong>