6/1/2006
I bought a Macbook to run Windows XP
I am blogging this on my new Apple Macbook. I'm using Windows XP on Boot Camp beta. It's great! I was thinking about getting a Dell Inspiron 6000 instead, but the Macbook's style won me over. The Macbook is more expensive than getting the Dell on sale, but the difference is only a couple of hundred dollars, so for me it was personally worth the extra money.
So far the issues with using the Macbook primarily as a Windows machine are:
- You need to buy and install a copy of Windows XP Home or Pro. (That adds another $100 to the cost of the Macbook for most people.)
- No right-mouse-button. A work-around is to press Shift-F10 to emulate a right-click.
- Have to use a keyboard remapping utility to mak the right Apple key to Delete.
- You have to waste 20GB of your hard disk on the Macintosh partition.
Apple will probably fix the delete key and right-click issues in future versions of Boot Camp.
I will say that I very much enjoyed playing with the included Mac software -- it's quite nicely put together. I especially liked these features:
- The two-finger touch pad short cuts for scrolling and right-clicking are great. I hope they become available on Windows XP in future versions of Boot Camp.
- The ability to exactly copy a data CD without having to install a third party utility.
- The clean and simple control panel UI.
- The very nice artwork (in terms of fonts, colors, and images) included in the system.
I think Boot Camp is a two-edged sword for Apple. On the one hand it removes a huge barrier-to-entry for people who need a real Windows machine. Since that's such a large percentage of the public, I think short-term this is a huge win for Apple.
Long term, however, the picture is somewhat bleaker. Boot Camp means there is much less reason for nich or hard-to-port products to be ported to the Macintosh. The clearest example of this is games, because games have a short shelf life, and game users are technically savvy enough to install and use Boot Camp. But it also means business applications.
It will be very interesting to see if Apple ever goes to a two-button track pad, as this is the last big hardware barrier to using their computer as a Windows PC.
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