Boot Camp, six months later

Just over six months ago, Apple dropped an unprecedented bombshell, one that many pundits—and even some users—were convinced would change the face of computing on the Mac forever. That surprise was Boot Camp, a program which helped you install Windows XP on a separate partition on your Mac, and let you choose at boot which OS to run.

Windows on Mac hardware had been widely whispered about since the transition to Intel chips had been announced. Mere weeks prior to the announcement of Boot Camp had seen a contest to do just that, with $14,000 awarded to the team that got XP to boot on an Intel Mac (if I were Apple—yes, the whole company—I would have released Boot Camp a few weeks early, collected the $14,000 and donated it to the Bill and Melinda Gates Charitable Foundation. Shazam.).

Then Apple came out with their own solution, as if to say: “oh, yeah, we’ve had that running here for ages.” There was a stunned silence, followed by the kind of roar usually reserved for sporting events. But what did it mean?

There was much talk, after Boot Camp’s release, that it could be the death of OS X. Most of the alarmism came from the camps (excuse me) that’s constantly been predicting Apple’s death for over ten years—call them the Beleaguered Bunch. Meanwhile, most thinking Mac fans held that OS X was going exactly nowhere and Boot Camp was nothing more than a marketing strategy by Apple.

And six months later, that’s exactly what Windows on Mac is: a bullet point on the sales chart. With Windows malware still a huge issue for users of that platform, and the Mac as free from viruses as it’s ever been (despite those constantly raising the alarm), the 64MB question of Boot Camp is: why would you want to run Windows on Mac? Since getting my desktop PC running again (in its sole purpose as a gaming machine), I’ve used Boot Camp on my MacBook maybe twice, most recently to apply a custom icon to the NTFS volume so it would stop looking so damn ugly on my OS X desktop. Given that it’s eating up 10GBs of legitimate hard drive space, I’m thinking about axing the partition altogether.

And so we have the real strategy of Boot Camp. For the existing userbase, it was nothing more than a novelty. We played around with it for a few days just to show that it could be done, then it was back to the grown-up’s OS. But for potential switchers, Boot Camp is much more: It’s a selling point, a safety net for people engaged in the Windows exodus. Because Apple knows that even if customers buy the machine because it has the option of running Windows, by the time they master OS X they’ll never go back. And for those needing to run Windows apps, there are other alternatives (CrossOver and Parallels) that don’t require the annoyance of rebooting, and are more than sufficient for most uses.

So what’s to come for Boot Camp? Apple’s said that it’ll be part of Leopard’s complete breakfast package, and many have theorized that its capabilities will turn towards virtualization, a la Parallels. I’m not convinced—the amount of engineering that’s required to implement virtualization vs. dual-booting seems like too much energy to put into running Windows on the Mac. Nor do I think they’re about to undercut Parallels after spending so much time pimping it to others. I’m expecting Leopard’s Boot Camp to include official support for Vista and better drivers, but that’s about it. And that’s a smart move for Apple: It’s minimal effort with maximal gain. Personally, I’d rather Apple spent the time improving running OS X on the Mac; that’s where the future really lies.