Potential benefits of Boot Camp
Running Windows XP on Macs
Many users and companies can potentially benefit from the availability of Boot Camp, which will be released as standard with OS X 10.5 At present Apple is being rather cool about the prospect of running Windows software, but it is hard to believe that they are quite so cool about the prospect of attracting Windows users to the Mac platform. There is good Mac accounting software, but business management software is generally perceived as being Windows-specific. Early reviews indicate that speed could be a significant advantage and that Boot Camp on a MacBook Pro will run faster than a 3gb dual-processor HP system. But there are, of course lots of other potential benefits, of which the following are just a few:
One set of hardware
No longer will Mac houses need a PC in the corner to run their accounts (there are excellent Mac accounting systems available but they are not so well known), or that indispensable Windows application for which there is no Mac equivalent. Gamers will be particularly delighted – though bosses may not be so pleased! Windows users who are enticed by the Apple brand will now have a bridge. And think of the saving in desk space.
Easy to manage
Apple systems are inherently simpler for the average user to handle.
No more Virtual PC
There have been way of running Windows operating systems such as virtual PC for years on Macs, but there have always been issues of speed and reliability, with some horror stories circulating. Boot Camp is not interpreting Windows to run on a PowerPC chip, but simply facilitating the installation, after which Windows runs in native mode on the Intel processor. The disadvantage of this approach is that your Mac cannot run both OSs concurrently: you choose the OS when you power up.
Apple advantages
There are actually quite a lot of these – a more robust OS, a better graphical user interface, the ever-groundbreaking Apple software and sheer pizzazz. The main disadvantage, other than price, of using Apple systems has always been availability of software and Boot Camp goes a long way to solving this.