Pundit reaction to Apple’s “Boot Camp” software was, as expected, swift, impassioned, and, well, all over the place. To some it meant the end of Apple. To others it foretold the death of Dell. Much of the hysteria blossomed before anyone had a chance to actually install the software, create the partition, and see how/if it worked. A major news wire service even completely misreported the story, giving the impression that Apple was installing Windows on new Intel Macs to help “smooth the transition”.

So, here we are “the morning after”, and here’s my calm, cool, and collected take on the whole thing.

Is Boot Camp a good thing? Yes. Will it help sell more Macs? I think so. There are certainly some people contemplating a Mac purchase that rightly fear losing the ability to use certain Windows applications not available on the Mac platform.

However, the Boot Camp method of “doing” Windows is, I believe, an interim “fix”, and has its drawbacks. In order to switch from one system to the other, you must stop what you’re doing, shut down, and reboot into the other system. Also, the Windows and Mac partitions are formatted differently, so there’s an issue with being able to access data from one partition while booted in the other.

There’s a better way to do this, one that I believe will be included in Apple’s upcoming “Leopard” release. It’s called “virtualization”, and it’s actually been around for quite some time. Mac users are familiar with Virtual PC’s emulation, but virtualization is a whole ‘nother animal.

Virtual PC was required because Macs used a different processor architecture (PowerPC) than Windows (x86). So much processing power was needed to run the emulated environment that the programs themselves ran dreadfully slowly.

Now that Macs run on Intel, and Windows runs on Intel, there’s no need to emulate the processor. With virtualization, you can run multiple operating systems on a single physical system, at the same time. Moving from one to the other is a simple as clicking from one window to another.

Just today, a company named Parallels announced a free, downloadable public beta of their Windows-on-Mac virtualization solution. Initial reports are that it’s not quite as fast as a full boot into Windows, but blazing compared to the old Virtual PC.

Before I finish typing this article, some new thing will probably happen. Ain’t technology grand?

© 2006 Peter F. Zimowski