boot-camp dept.

A lot of the A-list techno-bloggers in the blogosphere are speculating furiously over Apple's release of Boot Camp, a program that allows Intel-based Mac owners to dual boot OS X with other OSs. Robert X.Cringely has been the most imaginative, coming up with ever more fanciful ideas about the business logic behind Boot Camp.

Guess he doesn't have anything more interesting to write about.

Apple has a much more marginal market share than windows, as far as the personal computer market is concerned, and is never ever likely to prove a serious threat to the Windows/Intel juggernaut. Today their business is more about selling music, than about personal computers. My reasoning behind their releasing boot camp is much more mundane -- it is just an acceptance of market reality from Apple.

People have always run Windows applications on the Mac using VirtualPC. This is just a move to retain the market, and create another incentive to people who otherwise might shun apple hardware for compatibility reasons. So many people out there only buy Wintel machines because they *have to* use Windows software at work. So many games exist only for windows. Boot Camp will allow Apple to make inroads into that market, where people would buy Macs as high-performance PCs that run all the great mac applications out there *and* can run windows side-by-side.

The apple website recently linked to this story where XP benchmark results were compared for Apple hardware (Macbook Pro and the iMac -- wish they'd also covered the new iMac mini core duo) versus other high-end PC vendor machines. Apple either lead or was behind very marginally on most benchmark results.