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I don't see this as anything but trouble. There is now a very big new disincentive for developers considering releasing a product for OS X. Why bother when the Mac users can boot Windows, anyway?

uh, last time I checked XP doesn't have a force quit that works as well as the Mac force quit.

Well, it's trouble for a certain subset, sure. But I don't think it's trouble in general. OSX definitely has "buzz" going for it right now among the geek crowd. There are a lot of "Mac curious" developers out there who are starting to look at Mac development because of this. If you've got one or two major apps at your company, I think it'll provide you with a strong temptation to do a Mac version as an experiment and see how it goes. As the Mac marketshare cilmbs (and it seems that this is fairly certain now), the clamor for Mac-native software will only grow.

Vas, I don't see it as a development problem. I agree with Brad. VPC already "does" put Windows on Mac for weird things (as does the super cheap price of Windows machines. For $400-500 today, you can just have a Windows box to set next to your $1,500 mac which you would have paid $180 for VPC on...) Windows simply is too expensive to buy in a separate license off the shelf for most people.

So, while us geeks will be installing dual boots ASAP, the general public won't be. I work with them. They're scared to jump to Mac because they'll leave Windows behind. But all anyone I know who's non-geeky actually does on their computer is 1. Internet 2. mp3's 3. Photos and 4. Games. (Oh, and maybe 5 quicken.) Mac has all of that already in the basic bundle. People will start using MacOSX who buy it for a Windows compatible comfort machine, and won't even both to install windows. They'll transfer over their mp3's and photos and be done. (Trust me, I've seen how the people I work with "upgrade" their windows machines...)

The gamers will switch to Windows to play commercial games, and that will be about it. Brad's niche aside, most gamers seem to be going the console route anyway, and that market's fragmented all to hell itself. As games become more and more studio productions, I think Brad's blog predictions being true.

Anyway, when the "installed base" numbers for MacOSX hit 10% or 15% (Yeah, I'm still an AAPL dreamer somewhere in the back of my brain, crappy video board iBook and all!), developers won't cough and sputter anymore...

Jon

But are those the users that would buy brad's games anyway? I had OS/2 v2 & DOS/Win3.1. I switched the Win 3.1 to Win 95 beta, I don't think OS/2 survived the reformat to install Win 95 final.

It's going to be applications that keep the users in MacOS X. They are going to have to be cost effective and have the features the users need & you can't rely on them waiting for too long. Once people get used to booting into one OS it's hard to get them to switch. I killed OS/2 because I pretty had no reason to wait for it to boot up anymore.

It doesn't necessarily hurt apple in the short term, they get alot of money for someone to run windows. This could easily hurt the developer community. I guess they decided to support it in the end because end users were hacking it anyway.

smf

If you're a 12 year old kid whose friends live and breathe CounterStrike and your parents have an Intel Mac, how long do you suppose it would be before that Mac is dual-booting to shut the kid up? Never underestimate the power of a spoiled brat.

*rofl* Sorry, I just had to post this.

Has anyone read the Tech. Info. Library Article?

"Important: Apple does not provide technical phone support for ... Windows XP."

Yes, I know ... that's not exactly how it reads, but I just couldn't resist using the ellipsis!

In all seriousness, I do have a question. Is this really installable without erasing or formatting the drive? Or, does the drive need to be erased or formatted to create the Windows XP partition? I've always thought that to create a partition, it has to be done after formatting the disk.

In advance, thank you.

You can shrink the HFS+ partition without re-formatting.

Okay... Silly question... Is there an easy way to transfer documents between enviroments?

Make the XP partition smaller than 32GB and format it as FAT32. Then OS X will be able to read and write to it. If you use NTFS, OS X can read but not write to it.