Ihnatko: Dual Boot

(Editor’s Note: Long, long ago, I used to work at MacUser magazine. Our back-page columnist was Andy Ihnatko, a Mac writer of reknown. Andy went on to write a column for Macworld for many years as well. He still writes a monthly column for Macworld UK. Thanks to Andy and to Simon Jary at Macworld UK, we’ve arranged to republish his column here at MacUser. Andy Ihnatko on MacUser.com. It was true in 1997, and now it’s true again! —Jason Snell)

Sir Ben Kingsley’s most recent film was “Lucky Number Slevin,” an edgy comic thriller inspired by “Pulp Fiction.” A year or two before that, he anchored the haunting psychological drama “House Of Sand And Fog,” and of course nobody can ever take away his knighthood, his two Harold Pinter projects, or his Academy Award for “Gandhi.”

That said, the film he starred in before the Edgy Comic Thriller was “BloodRayne.” It was based on a second-tier video game about a sexy vampire. The title is written in NerdCaps and contains a one-syllable word that’s intentionally misspelled, like the name of every big-hair heavy-metal band from the early Eighties that had one hit song or fewer.

Peter Cook once starred in an American sitcom as the stuffy butler to a wacky suburban family. Mozart, fresh from the triumphant premiere of The Magic Flute, shot a series of ads for Burger King that aired for years on Japanese television. Yes, they were never meant to be seen over here, but will you ever forget the sour knot that formed in your stomach after you discovered the video on YouTube.com and saw him taking a dainty, foppish bite out of a Tendergrill Chicken Sandwich while playing “Ein Mädchen oder Weibchen” one-handed and backwards?

What I’m trying to explain is that every major superstar finds themselves slumming it on occasion. The fact that I rebooted my Core Duo iMac into Windows XP this morning is by no means a Bad Omen of some sort of downward spiral to come.

(Well, not to you people, anyway. To me, it means that I’m going to be spending a few hours today using the Windows user interface, trying to understand a subtle bug about the Windows Media Player well enough that I can then go and explain it in the pages of an upcoming book. From my own perspective, if you were to spin this iMac around you’d find a crude “666” in the plastic just under the Apple logo, and the letters would be in the color of my own blood.)

Yes, running Windows on a Mac is like seeing Sir Laurence Olivier in “The Clash Of The Titans.” No, let’s not flinch from this: it’s like casting him in the Spice Girls movie. And not through some sort of time machine, either. I mean, the producers drag whatever’s left of him out of his crypt, rig it all up to a radio-controlled armature designed by the Jim Henson Company, and then a special-effects team puppeteer him through the role of shady record-company executive Lord Ian Smythe Fink-Nottle.

It’s not a pretty thing, but hey, it’s business. When Robert De Niro signed for a supporting role in “The Adventures Of Rocky And Bullwinkle,” it was merely a means to an end. The challenge was almost negligible and the financial rewards were great; it was free cash that he could then spend on pet projects like his Tribeca Film Festival and that island he’d like to build in Galveston Bay where men will be hunted for sport. We Mac fans should approach Boot Camp with the same mindset.

After all, the timing of Apple’s announcement was hardly random. Every April and May, schools decide what computers they’re going to buy for the fall semester, and an individual order can easily climb into the thousands of units. In Maine, just an hour’s drive north of my home in Massachusetts, they decided that the kids would be better served using their computers to learn things like, I dunno, math and reading and geography, instead of learning how to fix a corrupted Windows Registry file and how quickly the W32.Kidala.c@m virus propagates. So they bought iBooks for the entire state school system. Macs have always had a certain advantage in the classroom but now they have another one: they run Windows.

And that advantage stretches to all sectors. At this stage in the Mac’s development, the biggest obstacle to getting more Macs in more corporate environments is the deplorable state of education among IT staff. Awful stories land in my mailbox nearly every day: the person in charge of installing and supporting the technology infrastructure in a 400-seat office unilaterally banishes all Macs…all future purchases, as well as all of the existing machines that have been working great for years. And why? “Because Macs don’t work with Windows.”

When you plug this phrase into Google’s language services, it returns an English translation of “The only technical training I’ve had is six months of night classes with no practical experience, and honestly, I only wound up in that class because the hairdressing one was full.” Babelfish translates it as “I can’t be bothered.” Boot Camp represents a rolled-up newspaper swatted in that IT person’s nose.

Yes, the real Win of Windows On A Mac isn’t actually being able to run Windows apps. TheWin is the mere idea of it, the way that it slams the door on any future argument of incompatibility. And it opens the tantalizing possibility of Trojan Horsing a few Macs into a hitherto all-Windows environment.

Case in point: just a couple of weekends ago, a young cousin of mine asked for advice on what sort of laptop she should buy for her first year of college. “A MacBook, no question,” I said. Usually I stifle my own bias and sound out the inquisitor for details about the sort of things they want to do and the requirements of their workplace, but not any more. “A Macintosh is the only computer in the world that can run Mac software and Windows software and Linux software,” I said, launching a few Windows apps on my own MacBook to underscore the point, and running them side-by-side with iLife using Parallels Workstation.

Sold. It’s a conversation that’ll be repeated in homes and schools and offices all over the world. Why shouldn’t your next Windows machine be a Mac? And after a few months of using both operating systems, who wouldn’t gravitate to Tiger?

But perhaps the best feature of Boot Camp — better than its functions, better than what it does to the “Mac vs. PC” debate, better even than the fact that it’s a core technology of the next version of the Mac OS, and it’ll surely become even better than what we’re seeing now — is the fact that you can always make your Mac stop running Windows whenever you want. I’ve used PCs since the mid-Eighties and by far, that’s the one feature I’ve always been clamoring for.

Because while it shows a certain amount of maturity to acknowledge that Al Pacino has his expensive pet theatrical projects, vacation homes, and vices both public and private that sometime require him to agree to star in movies like “Gigli,” it’s also appropriate to insist that after he appears in the Ben Affleck/Jennifer Lopez screwball comedy, he must reboot immediately into “The Merchant Of Venice.”