Dual Booting Macs officially supported by Apple

Apple officially supports dual booting and installation of Windows XP. It's just in public beta now, but will be standard in the next major OS upgrade (10.5). As a developer, I'm excited about this and as a gamer, I'm f'ing estatic! This may mean I can actually convince my employers to buy a Mac as a work machine for me as well.

Now to bring on the intel Powermacs.

EDIT: Made the title more descriptive and removed my grammar mistake as pointed out by BadFerret.

Never is in the wrong place, and until Apple allows clones, price will remain a valid reason to keep buying PCs.

They've been assimilated.

IMAGE(http://www.spectacle.org/pictures/borg.jpg)

Resistance is futile.

Macs are still PCs (just mac os based vs windows os based) so technically you still have a reason to buy a PC

painthappens wrote:

Macs are still PCs (just mac os based vs windows os based) so technically you still have a reason to buy a PC :D

I agree with you, but have thought to go with the wrong industry standard. Consider that fact that it's usuallly called the "Mac vs PC" debate.

Beat to the punch! Well, I had suspected this based on rumours I'd read since the Intel-chip/Macs were introduced.

I'm just sorry that another competitor to Windows OS has been eliminated; with the ongoing Windows Vista and MS Office delays, I guess the future is longer delays and less satisfaction (and greater virus/spyware problems).

Really, the only reason I still have a PC and not a Mac as my main computing platform is because of the gaming. Once this has been put through it's paces and they can say that the performance is on par with a PC for gaming, I'm getting a Mac with that dual boot option.

Moving to tech.

booty wrote:

Now to bring on the intel Powermacs.

And the drivers. But really, once those two things are available, I'm afraid I just might need to buy myself a new computer. This is a very happy day for people for Mac gamers. No longer shall the term be an oxymoron! Sure, we still won't be playing games on the Mac OS, but we will be playing on Mac hardware.

cewargamer wrote:

Beat to the punch! Well, I had suspected this based on rumours I'd read since the Intel-chip/Macs were introduced.

I'm just sorry that another competitor to Windows OS has been eliminated; with the ongoing Windows Vista and MS Office delays, I guess the future is longer delays and less satisfaction (and greater virus/spyware problems).

I don't see how Mac OS has been eliminated as a competitor to Windows OS. They're not making Mac OS run on a PC. If anything, this will drive up Mac hardware sales, where Apple makes most of their non-Ipod money. It lowers the barrier for non Mac users to trying out Mac OS. From my experience, the more people who try Mac OS for more than a day vastly prefer it over Windows OS.

booty wrote:

It lowers the barrier for non Mac users to trying out Mac OS. From my experience, the more people who try Mac OS for more than a day vastly prefer it over Windows OS.

Exactly. I work at a company that uses Macs exclusively for it's desktop machines (we use FreeBSD for our servers, but that is a different matter). Without fail, every technical person we hire Female Doggoes and moans at first about having to use a Mac, but starts singing a different tune after a month or two. A good number of them (mostly those that don't care about games) have even gone on to replace their home machines with Macs.

Someone do this and let me know how Oblivion runs on the Mac.

sheared wrote:

Someone do this and let me know how Oblivion runs on the Mac.

An excellent idea. Souldaddy, you have access to Intel Macs, right?

I'm confused about the hype. So now you can have the "inferior" OS on the more expensive hardware?

LiquidMantis wrote:

I'm confused about the hype. So now you can have the "inferior" OS on the more expensive hardware?

It's all about the games, man. I'm willing to pay more for what I get with my Mac, but the fact that I will now be able to play games on the same machine is the reason for "all the hype."

Sorry, folks, just got out of a meeting about this, VERY cool stuff, but I can't share too much without losing my job I'll tell you what I can, though. The website for this is here. All this info is there, but to summarize:

This is a much better implimentation that the hack that came out last month. Boot Camp does a few things:

#1) Partitions the hard drive without losing your current data (bling!)
#2) Does some secret stuff to allow WinXP (a non EFI OS) to run on EFI.
#3) Creates a CD-R of all the drivers WinXP needs to use the computer, including ethernet and airport, 3d cards (ie, games), audio, bluetooth (but not the apple wireless mouse and keyboard) and even the eject key. All the drivers are part of the boot camp. You should be able to play games on it immediately.

To correct the first thing, Apple doesn't support this, ie, don't call applecare with your problems (but you can ask me and I'll see what I can do. I don't look in this forum too often so send me a PM)

You need a full version of Win XP with Service Pack 2 as part of the install disk. No upgrade disks, no disks before SP2, SP2 can't be on a separate disk.

Coolest thing is that Apple is building this into their next version of OS X by default.

And yes, I own an Intel iMac and will be installing this as soon as NewEgg delivers my copy of XP

Thats pretty sweet.. now I'm eager for the next round of laptops..

I'm soo excited, I think it may be time to snag that dual core mac mini I've been eyeballing.I was one of those tech guys who didnt like working on a mac at first, but after the last 6 months on one, I'm seriously considering picking one up for home. I like the OS a whole lot more than WinXP, and it looks like now I can have both on the same machine? GREAT!

Sweet, Souldaddy. I'm looking forward to your impressions!

BTW, if you are ever gonna buy Windows, go to NewEgg.com and search for "Windows (version) OEM"

Microsoft Windows XP Professional With SP2 - OEM - $140!

souldaddy wrote:

BTW, if you are ever gonna buy Windows, go to NewEgg.com and search for "Windows (version) OEM"

Microsoft Windows XP Professional With SP2 - OEM - $140!

For twice that you can get $10K of microsoft software, including 10 licenses of XP Pro.

Hey Eezy, do you need to register as an ISV with Microsoft to get that deal? Or is it available to anyone?

doihaveto wrote:

Hey Eezy, do you need to register as an ISV with Microsoft to get that deal? Or is it available to anyone?

You have to 'register' but you don't need to be a business.

Supposedly Far Cry and Doom 3 run excellent on the iMac. Though that isn't saying much since those games are old.

Press Pass highlighted this 1up article where they installed Half-life 2, Black, and Oblivion. Not the most useful article since they didn't compare it to other PC laptops, but all the games played at medium settings with a decent framerate. heart-rate... rising...

I read the article but it did not include hard numbers. I have screenshots from my laptop running Oblivion with the FPS displayed in the Story and Spoliers thread.

I need $2k to blow on a laptop.

So in other news, whenever Apple gets around to releasing an Intel based professional desktop model I'll be buying a second copy of Oblivion.

PCWorld did use Doom3 and Farcry but they did put up numbers.

I was in database class not paying attention like normal and when I look to my left I see my classmate playing BF2 at quite the nice speed on his MacBook Pro. Looks good!

So I just installed WinXP on my iMac. DAMN, this desktop is ugly. Anyone got anything I can use to pretty it up? Edwin, your UI looked different...

I knew Boot Camp was going to be easy, but I didn't expect THIS easy. It partitioned the hard drive while I was still on the OS X desktop and I appeared to have full access to all the files and apps the whole time. BC created a disc of Windows drivers, then asked for the XP install disk. XP ran its install, no different than for the rest of you. Total time was about 30 minutes, including a firmware update.

XP didn't ask for the driver disc, so I just stuck it in at first opportunity and it installed everything in one shot. None of the drivers are authenticated, BTW. The ATI drivers support my dual 20" extended desktop, although it is incorrectly reporting the resolution on the main display as 1680 x 1050. When I first activated extended desktop, the wallpaper on the second desktop started "walking" to the right. Also, there is a LOT of tearing on the side edges of a window when you move them around. Is that normal?

WoW installation has failed twice so far. Windows seems be less efficient using the dvd drive, because on both the XP install, the drivers disc, and now the WoW install the heads have been slamming back and forth. The same WoW discs have the install for both Mac and PC, err, OS X and Windows, so I'll give it a test in OS X later.

The only games I have to compare OS performance are Doom 3 and WoW. I am not expecting OS X to do well. More on that later.