Bunk Camp - Apple Gets It Wrong? 731
An anonymous reader writes "CNET.com.au has posted a commentary that attempts to cut away the hype surrounding Boot Camp. From the article: 'Boot Camp will do little to coax Windows XP users into switching to Mac OS X. For this to happen, Apple needs to either license out OS X to all users -- not just Mac owners -- or support a true Mac virtualisation application.'"
who cares if apple sells more copies of osx? (Score:2, Informative)
Re:How long (Score:5, Informative)
Re:No hardware lockin (Score:2, Informative)
Re:A big reason Apple doesn't want to sell OS X (Score:5, Informative)
Nonsense. The reason Apple doesn't want to sell OS X to PC users is because they make much more money selling hardware than software. Apple is in business to make a profit (and fortunately they seem to believe that producing a great product is the right way to do that). They aren't going to intentionally do things that reduce their profits.
Don't forget that Apple has already been down the road of licensing the OS. It nearly killed them. People starting buying Power Computing machines because they ran Mac OS as well or better than Apple hardware, and significantly cut into their sales -- sure they were getting OS license fees, but at the same time it was causing Apple's market share to plumet. Even though between Apple and Power Computing the Mac OS market share was growing, the press saw Apple's market share going down and started sounding the death knells. This helped convince developers and consumers that Apple was irrelevant and (combined with many other factors, including increasing quality of Windows) they were in real trouble. It finally took Microsoft making a deal with Apple to keep producing Office for the next 5 years to reduce the hemoraging enough for a turnaround (which started with killing the licensing and bring out the iMac).
There are some differences today, Apple is hip because of the iPod and OS X, but it would still be a really tough battle to get to the point where OS X licenses replaced the lost revenue from hardware sales. That not to say that this could never happen, but I would say Apple would have to have 10%+ market share and growing before it would be worth the risk.
Q/QEMU (Score:1, Informative)
Re:FP? (Score:1, Informative)
Re:FP? (Score:5, Informative)
Re:FP? (Score:3, Informative)
Re:FP? (Score:3, Informative)
Actually it did work for OS/2:
OS/2 Marketshare (peak): 10-15%
Mac Marketshare (current): 2%
Oh wait.
If Apple could somehow "fail" like OS/2, while quadrupling their sales, I think they would interested.
Re:FP? (Score:3, Informative)
Re:FP? (Score:3, Informative)
Re:How do you explian Linux's stability? (Score:3, Informative)
Re:FP? (Score:4, Informative)
With Apple's switch to Intel the PPC Macs will still be supported under the next OS expected to be coming in December/January which is another 18-24 months of direct support plus 18-24 months security updates after the next-next OS has been released. People buying the Intel Macs are able to run most PPC programs under Rosetta while waiting for the programmers to release universal binary versions.
Unlike PC manufacturers, Apple tends to support new technologies first and drop legacy hardware sooner, but they can still be used as add-on cards or through USB/Firewire.