bootcamp
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Uninformed opinion: Boot Camp is lame
I haven't been within 50 feet of an Intel Mac since I saw them at Macworld. However, I can tell you without a doubt Boot Camp is great. Just from what I've seen, it automates a process that, for busy people or less-techie, is just a bit of a pain. However, it is a beta. It is NOT intended for mass consumption, in the broader sense. Still, with all those caveats, some people still don't get it. Remember that crazy joke of an article about the Mac Mini: The Emperor's New Computer? Someone told me that was a joke. If so, it's funny. If not, we have a worse problem with education in this country than I thought. And in the same vein as that piece of garbage comes this: Boot Camp crashes and burns. I'm nearly speechless at the ignorance and level of FUD in the article. Seriously, read it and just try to keep your head from exploding.I mean, in the heat of blogging we've been known to make mistakes. Even reporters and book authors stretch the truth. But when you start talking about Boot Camp being an "emulator," you have clearly missed the boat entirely and wound up on the Shores of Stupid. Never mind the stereotyping of Mac users as not being computer literate or gamers. OK, I'll cop to the last point. But saying something as asinine as "getting a Mac to run PC games will result in heartache - this I can guarantee" is just asking for hurt. Really? C.K., I'd like to jump into that wormhole you went in to, because apparently only Bizzaro world will see Guild Wars operating properly on Mac hardware. Someone tell me this is a joke...
Blizzard: We won't stop Mac development
Blizzard Entertainment, creators of highly addictive cross-platform games like World of Warcraft (among others) have announced their intentions to continue work on Mac-native games. In a statement earlier in the week, the company said, “We have a recognized track record of native Mac OS support, and we have no plans to break with that tradition. We understand that our Mac player base prefers native software whenever possible, and our cross-platform development practice addresses that."Translation: Just because Mac OS 10.5 will allow you to very easily run Windows on your Intel Mac, Blizzard (and other Mac game developers, we're betting) won't be giving up the ghost. So fear not! Now if you'll excuse me, it's been a whole ninety minutes since I've played World of Warcraft, and I'm starting to twitch a little.[Via Macworld]
Boot Camp users: We're stuck in Windows
Talk about a nightmare. Several Boot Camp users have logged on to Apple's discussion boards to share their horror story: The can't boot back into Mac OS X. Forum user TChi wrote:"It all worked fine until I wanted to start up OS X. Then the startup screen never progressed. I actually left and came back an hour later and it was still just the gear thing spinning around."There are at least ten other posts there that describe the same issue involving XP on a MacBook Pro via Boot Camp. A number of fixes have been posted, but (as of my typing this) a one-size-fits-all solution is yet to be offered. The lessons to be learned here? A.) Boot Camp is beta software B.) Carbon Copy Cloner is your friend and C.) Being stuck with Windows is your punishment for installing Windows (that last one was a joke)!Seriously, if you've had a similar experience and have found a fix, feel free to post it here (or at Apple's discussion board). Your fellow Mac users will thank you.[Via PC World]
Apple KB Article: Boot Camp doesn't work with multiple partitions
The first thing I do when I get a new Mac (or a new PC for that matter) is wipe out the hard drive, make two partitions, and do a fresh install on one of the partitions. I then store all my data on the other partition, just in case I ever need to reinstall the OS (is this a fool proof way to back up your data? Not by a long shot, since your data and the OS might be on different partitions but those partitions are still sitting on the same disk).Why am I talking about this? Because it would seem that people like me are left out in the cold with Boot Camp, since Boot Camp requires an Intel Mac with a single partition to work its magic. This makes sense since Boot Camp uses different partitioning magic, but it is still worth noting.
Apple turning Windows into the new Classic?
John Gruber has posted an interesting analysis of Apple's treatment of Windows in light of Boot Camp and the rampant speculation as to the possibility of Windows virtualization built into Mac OS X 10.5, due out this fall.While many publications are cranking out guesses (regardless of their education) as to what Boot Camp means to Apple and the future of Mac OS X, Gruber's analysis brings some clarity to the noise as he delves into the various ways that Apple has marketed Boot Camp's abilities, including the interesting language they used on Boot Camp's site, which we briefly pointed out at the product's release.Check out John's analysis if you're interested in a thorough analysis from a respected Apple pundit on what all this Boot Camp business means.
Boot Camp can run Vista, too
Some might say that using Boot Camp to run Windows XP on a Mac is so last week. Some enterprising hackers at the OSx86 Project seem to agree, as they have successfully gotten a preview version of Vista - Microsoft's upcoming Windows upgrade originally slated for 2003 - to run on an Intel iMac. Apparently there's some odd install hiccups to tinker with, as Engadget notes, so it sounds like this might not exactly be for the for the faint of heart Boot Camp Mac user.Nevertheless, if you are the lucky owner of an Intel Mac and have either a desire or a need to play with Windows Vista, check out this OSx86 Project thread.
Your MacBook Pro is a Windows speed demon
According to Macworld's benchmarks it looks like the MacBook Pro is a Windows XP speed demon, of course, C.K. already told you this. In particular, they found Office 2002 in XP on the Pro absolutely flew. I thought that laptop was a little too businesslike. Maybe the revamped iBooks will have some color (and be single core no doubt). Macworld and their sister pub PC World tested the iMac and MacBook Pro against a couple of Windows machines to see who was faster. Every machine was pretty darn close, really. Maybe the aerodynamics of Apple's gear gives it an edge?
Engadget Podcast 075 - 04.12.06
We're a day late, but definitely not a dollar short this week. Just when we thought last week's trip out to Vegas for CTIA was going to be a bit of a bust, Apple goes and drops a bombshell on the industry in the form of the dual-bootin' Windows-enablin' Boot Camp beta software. In the mean time while we weren't pontificating what Apple's big scene-stealing news meant for the industry, we were poking around various handset makers' booths in search of such devices as Samsung's new T719, those Intel-based UMPCs, and the slew of sweet knockoffs TechFaithWireless had to showcase. We'll let you know how all that went (and more) on this week's show, so let's get to it! Get the podcast [iTunes] Subscribe to the Podcast directly in iTunes (MP3). [RSS] Add the Engadget Podcast feed to your RSS aggregator and have the show delivered automatically (MP3). [MP3] Download the show (MP3). [AAC] Download the show (enhanced AAC). [OGG] Download the show (OGG). [Vote] Vote for us on Podcast Alley! Hosts Peter Rojas and Ryan Block Producer Randall Bennett Music J J J - 'Suits' in Japan Format 41:51, 24.1 MB, MP3 Program 01:30 - Boot Camp lets Macs run Windows ... officially 14:09 - Hands on with some UMPCs 11:54 - A look at TechFaith's Moto Q knockoff 18:44 - Hands on with the RAZR V3m 22:01 - Samsung's T719 29:34 - Listener voicemail 36:15 - Engadget's involuntary entry into retail, and the week ahead LISTEN (MP3) LISTEN (AAC) LISTEN (OGG) Contact the podcast: 1-888-ENGADGET, Engadget (Gizmo Project) or podcast at engadget dawt com
Tips for Boot Campers
Victor has a post over at DownloadSquad with some handy tips for those of you running Windows on your Mac via Boot Camp. I like the idea of using the Windows .Mac tool to actually get some value out of my .Mac account for a change. One observation that I'd like to make: whoever spends money on Microsoft Office for Windows is a fool. Open Office on XP runs like a charm; it's much better than the OS X version.The seasoned Windows users amongst you will most likely find Victor's introductory post on this topic a bit too basic, but he's sure to crank out more in the future, and as always feel free to weigh in with your own ideas in the comments to either this post or Victor's.
Switched On: Boot Camp - The Miffing Manual
Each week Ross Rubin contributes Switched On, a weekly column about the future of technology, multimedia, and digital entertainment:"All right! Listen up, maggot! Welcome to Fort Dragg. I am your Commanding Microsoft Office-er Sgt. Pepper! How do you like that for trademark infringement, Apple Corps? I bet you came here today because you wanted to serve your computer company by beta testing Boot Camp? Well, let me tell you something. It ain't gonna be easy, you puke!"Over the next 50 minutes, I will become your father, your mother, your Apple Specialist, your third-tier tech support person, and your best friend! Your heart may belong to Apple but your butt belongs to me! Your precious vendor won't support other operating systems, so you better be quicker than a FireWire 800 port, because if you ain't, you just may blow your disk up with your laser mouse."You come here as a sack of rotting apples unfit to touch a scroll ball! But I will tear down your hard drive into partitions until you cry. You will feel the burn like a driver CD. You will break like compatibility with classic Mac applications. Your identity will be so far gone that Spotlight won't be able to find it. Remember, there is no Windows ME in 'team.' If you can reset your system clock, you will leave with a time-killing, dual-booting, PC game-running machine! Do you hear me!?""Sir! Yes, sir!"
WoW on the Mac Safe From Windows
For all you Mac-based WoW players out there who have feared that the release of Apple's new Boot Camp software (allowing Mac users to run both Win XP & OS-X) might singal the end of native gaming development for the Mac, Blizzard has announced that the Mac version of WoW will indeed continue to recieve native support, so anyone worried about having to eventually switch to a Boot-Camped Windows version can rest easy.Apple claims the Windows version of WoW should be playable with Boot Camp, but as the Boot Camp software is still in beta, they will not offer support for running in this environment. A story in today's Macworld has more on the issue.I still wanna know: how the heck do you play on a Mac without a second mouse button?
Gordon Freeman goes to Boot Camp on a Mac
Consider this a followup to our earlier post about Half-Life 2 running on an Intel Mac hacked to dual boot both Mac OS X and Windows. Now, with Apple's Boot Camp software and the official drivers bundled therein, Macs can not only run PC games (like Half-Life 2) in Windows, but can run them "shockingly well."The test computer -- an Intel-based iMac, with an ATi Mobility Radeon X1600 graphics chip -- does indeed appear to run Half-Life 2 swimmingly. If the embedded YouTube version is acting up, be sure to check out the higher quality Quicktime version on Cabel's site.[Thanks, kevan]
A Weekend with an XP iMac
This weekend, I conducted a little experiment. I used Boot Camp to boot my 17-inch 1.83GHz iMac Core Duo with 2GBs of RAM and an external 24-inch monitor in Windows XP and then I forced myself to remain in XP. I didn't reboot into OS X. Instead, I explored the Windows performance on the machine. Overall, I have to admit, it was a positive experience. I still prefer OS X, but I can now see the advantages to booting into XP from time to time. One odd thing that I wasn't expecting was that I didn't find myself loathing Windows quite as much. Something about running it quickly on my nice iMac made it more pleasant than all of my previous experiences running XP on various PC boxes. It's still the fastest I've ever seen Windows perform. Half of this is probably that I didn't load it down with lots of crap programs, and I had it properly protected immediately after install with virus, firewall, and spyware protection. There were negative aspects to the experience. It hard crashed at least 5 times on me this weekend. This mostly happened when I was installing something... More after the jump...
Vista successfully installed on a Mac
It was only a matter of time, but hey, for those closely monitoring the progress of Windows on Macs, it looks like peeps on the OSx86 Project forums have fully done the deed with Vista on an iMac. We're not going to get into the nitty gritty right here and now, but it sounds like the trick is to get Vista to stop trying to kill the OS X partition when installing with Boot Camp -- an urge in the installer that seems to be kept at bay by taking out the 200MB EFI partition. But if you're the type of person how wants to go for the gold and not just read about this stuff (which you probably are if you've gotten this far), we suggest actually looking into this a little further before knocking around partitions on your Mac just to get a beta Microsoft operating system up and running, mkay?[Thanks, Mike and Jon]
Why your school doesn't want boot camp
A trend I'd like to see go the way of the dodo: every time Apple introduces something new that doesn't seem to appeal to the average home user, the net lights up with wild speculation that it's for the education market. Most of the time it's not, and Boot Camp is no exception. The reaction to Boot Camp from MacEnterprise and other education and business Mac communities has not been positive. It's ranged from "wait and see" to "why me?" with most of the responses at the "why me?" end. Boot Camp is, in the words of University sysadmin and TUAW reader Jason Young, quite possibly "any IT staff member’s worst nightmare come true." And here are just a few of the reasons I think he's right:First, we live in a very imperfect world. Heterogeneous networks are messy, messy things. Sure there are protocols for Active Directory, Open Directory, LDAP, DHCP, etc., but vendors do one of two things: fail to implement the spec properly, or add a bunch of proprietary bells and whistles that aren't part of the spec, are technically add-ons, but still seem to mysteriously cause hardware or software to fail when they aren't present. Throw a couple of DNS forwarding issues, some CISCO equipment and maybe a Radius server into the mix, and things get ugly fast. What's the admins final line of defense against complete network chaos? Hardware addressing. Figure out what hardware is sitting at which MAC address, and build policies based on that. It's not ideal, but it's the the way the real world works. If you can't predict the OS type from the MAC, your job becomes 10 times harder in a flash.Second, nobody actually wants to reboot. It's time consuming, stressful on the hardware, and just generally not too much fun. It also means getting users in the habit of interacting with the firmware, which is something sane sysadmins want to avoid at all costs. What admins, and others, want is real virtualization. Not dual booting. Not emulation and compatibility layers. Real virtualization. When Apple delivers that, there will be partying in the streets.Third, there's no support and it doesn't look like there's ever going to be. Unlike the rest of us peons, large education and enterprise clients spend a lot of money on premium AppleCare services. They have reps who know them by name, and part of what makes Macs appealing is that you call one number and get integrated hardware and OS support. If Apple won't support Windows, dual booting will mean buying a second support contract for the same machine. hat more than negates the cost benefit of a single machine solution. Beige boxes are cheap and procurement already has contracts with HP and Dell. There is, of course, a potential for third parties here to step up and become Apple Authorized Resellers offering pre-configured machines with support, but that's a niche market. Most organizations that buy Macs want to deal directly with Apple.And then for education tech support, there's the added fun of personal machines that people use to connect to the network....Individual admins, of course, are thrilled. Being able do dual boot, say, a MacBook Pro means only needing one machine to administer everything. But supporting it for users? That's a different story.
Apple should offer Macs with OS X and Windows for businesses
The internet is absolutely abuzz on fire over the ramifications of Boot Camp, and this time around the wild speculation isn't confined just to the crazed, Mountain-Dew-infused digg posts. Everyone is hypothesizing that Boot Camp signifies things like the death of Mac gaming, software support for OS X or even that Dvorak (the shock-journalist that he is) was right after all.There are quite a few articles out there, however, about the appeal that these Intel Macs and Boot Camp have to education and IT departments of companies both big and small. A lot of headlines like "Companies now have one more reason to look at the Mac" are piling into endo at an alarming rate, and I started thinking about something C.K. said when Boot Camp landed: "However, over time, if Apple plays it's cards right and doesn't screw things up, people will see that booting into OS X runs more smoothly and is nicer than booting into Windows, and we may see more switchers than ever before."While that's probably very true on the consumer side of things, I'm willing to bet that, even if businesses want to gobble up a batch of Macs overnight, the software they need their company to run isn't going to magically start working on OS X in the blink of an IT manager's eye. Honestly, I never thought I would say this, but case in point: if Apple started offering Macs with OS X and Windows pre-installed to the business sector, they could rake in companies looking to switch by the truck load. This option would be the nail in the coffin for business customers who want an out-of-the-box solution for getting set up on Macs with a minimum of fuss. In fact, there would be any fuss. These customers would have the best of both worlds from the moment they hit the power button, and Apple would have a rock solid strategy for putting business hardware competitors like Dell on the run.Apple doesn't need to license Mac OS X to PC manufacturers. With all the doors that Boot Camp opens for the company, Apple simply need to warn them to get out of the way.
Mac game devs cautiously optimistic about Boot Camp
Mac gaming website Inside Mac Games has posted a selection of Mac game developers reaction's to Apple's Boot Camp software. The overall feeling from the developers is one of cautious optimism: any loss in interest for OS X specific games could be offset by an increase in overall Mac market share from casual Windows gamers flooding to the platform. Andrew Welch, the founder of Ambrosia Software (creators of classics like the Escape Velocity series of games), doesn't "view it as a threat at all... but then again, we're not in the porting business". Aspyr's Glenda Adams and Brad Oliver are in the porting business. Fortunately they also publish and port games for other platforms. According to Brad "if Mac sales tank, we've got enough revenue coming in from PC and console ports that it probably won't hurt the company too much and we'd just focus on the other platforms." Mac game sales will only tank if people stop buying Mac games and instead play their games in Windows but as Andrew says, "people will get sick of dual-booting, and would prefer to run native games, just like Linux users prefer native games". Ian Lynch Smith of Freeverse points out that this may be only the first step: "Apple is pushing the intel roll out very aggressively, and now aggressively pushing dual boot (and virtualization eventually from someone)". Hopefully in the next 6 months we'll see effective virtualization of Windows games from within OS X. That's the most desirable outcome for both Mac users and developers.[Via TUAW]
Now that you've turned your Mac into a PC, turn it into a Mac again
So you've done the formerly impossible and unnecessary: installed Winders on a Mac. Cool, best of both worlds. But there you are, staring at that awful primary color, jumbo crayon, sickly plasticky XP theme. Yeah, you could use one of the many mods featured on Download Squad (please, feel free). Or you could turn your XP rig back into a Mac. At least, you can make XP look a lot more like a Mac. Engadget did this nearly 2 years ago, although Aqua-Soft is still updating their content. Or why not go old school with an OS 9 flavor? Ah, that's better.
What to do if you followed the "Other" dual-boot instructions?
I'm fortunate to have two MacBook Pros here at Pourhadi Labs. Yesterday I jumped on the opportunity to load XP on one of them with Boot Camp. But when OnMac.net announced their Windows/Mac dual-boot solution a little while ago, our first instinct was to install right away and give it a whirl. Five hours, six Cokes and a severe case of Post-Progress Bar Stress Disorder (PPBSD) later, we had a working Windows OS slowly sucking the life from one of our MacBooks. That was all well and good at the time...but then Apple introduced Boot Camp and a BIOS-enabling firmware patch and we were stuck with a copy of XP without all the bells and whistles of a functioning Windows installation (like, uh, graphics support).Attempting to install the firmware update on a machine with the OnMac.net hacked-up bootloader doesn't work. Dunno why -- we'd get the loud beep noise, indicating the MBP recognized an update was ready to install. But instead of loading it, OS X loaded instead. So hmph.Turns out the only solution (that I found, at least), unfortunately, is totally formating your drive. Again. Then re-install OS X, load the firmware patch, and run Boot Camp. A good afternoon worth of tedious, PPBSD-inducing work.Of course, I probably missed something that would've made the whole process easier. And I guess if you don't feel like going through the hassle of doing the installation The Right Way, you could get a Macintosh Drivers Disk (produced by Boot Camp) from a friend with an (a) equivalent and (b) firmware-patched machine. If you do go that route, let us know how it worked.In fact, if you've installed the OnMac.net solution, let us know in the comments how you feel about the Boot Camp thing -- and what you're going to do.
TUAW Poll results: Will you dual-boot your Mac?
Many of our informal polls produce fairly even results. Not so with this one. Of the 5,228 of you who responded to the question, "Will you dual-boot your Mac," a full 50% (2,593) of you said, "absolutely." Twenty three percent of you stated that you have no need to do this and fourteen percent said they'd do it just to see it work. Finally, 681 of you (13%), thought the idea was pure blasphemy.Personally, I'd do it just to see it work, but I immediately thought of the financial department at my day job when this news broke. We use nothing but Macs where I work, except for the finance department. They use a proprietary piece of software that is (and will stay) Windows only. So, the person who does payroll must keep both a Mac and a PC on her desk so she can use the payroll software just once every two weeks. A dual-boot Mac seems custom-made for her situation. I'm sure similar scenarios could be found all over the country. Add to that the number of potential new customers who are considering Macs for the very first time, based on Boot Camp's introduction, and we could have a hardware war on our hands.
