When Apple pre-released bootcamp it “wow’ed” the world. Thousands of Apple fans couldn’t believe their eyes and I even read some articles which mentioned tears of joy. But what could be the reason behind bootcamp?
There has been some speculation on that, and Robert X. Cringely offers an intriguing guess at what might be the real purpose behind it:
‘I believe that Apple will offer Windows Vista as an option for those big customers who demand it, but I also believe that Apple will offer in OS X 10.5 the ability to run native Windows XP applications with no copy of XP installed on the machine at all. This will be accomplished not by using compatibility middleware like Wine, but rather by Apple implementing the Windows API directly in OS X 10.5.’
According to one of the comments in the /. article, Apple and Microsoft signed a contract back in 1997 that allow them to have access to each other’s APIs, however we all know those are not always reliable, but still, if this becomes true, Apple will yet again take a slice of the Windows users. Actually it’s more of a dream come true! Think about it, Windows applications without Windows’ dysfunctionality!
Complete horsesh**.
Do they have any idea the complexity and time it would take for apple to implement the full windows api to runs windows app natively???? Heck the wine implementation isn’t even complete and they been at it for what? 5 years?
There is no mystery to bootcamp, apple devs probably already had something similar, saw people were trying to hack to get that functionality, so they released a tool to make it easy for users and stop them hacking about.
what about the virus/spyware issue?
If it can run Windows apps, isn’t that open the door for all the bad stuff as well?
+1 horsesh**
I wish someone would pay me to make up stuff like Dvorak and Cringely. Don’t bother with the research (who HASN’T heard about how hard it’s been to make Wine?), just try to say something provocative.
Dvorak and Cringely are idiots. Never listen to them because they don’t know what they’re talking about. If you want to read from someone who’s tuned-in to Apple, check out John Gruber at daringfireball.net.
“Windows applications without Windows’ dysfunctionality!”
I have two (primary) problems with the line of thought expressed here:
(1) Boot Camp allows users to multi-boot OS X and Windows. It’s a boot-loader, nothing more. No different from Grub/Lilo/Yaboot/BootX. Having not personally used Boot Camp, all it does is provide an OS X native interface to the boot loader’s configuration.
(2) Even if Apple manages to implement the Windows API, how can you expect to run windows apps without all the trouble of windows? If anything, you’re running an application in an environment for which it was not tested or intended.
The Windows API is a mammoth beast which has developed over the course of many years. It has grown by extension with backward-compatibility in mind. Any third-party implementation (see WINE) has a massive task ahead of them. However, if Apple does indeed have direct access to the API definition, it does provide a significant advantage over other implementations.
Expecting Windows apps to run natively, flawlessly on OS X is unrealistic. Running on identical processor architectures does nothing to span the API and functionality chasm of software built upon software.
fuk thats to much