Boot Camp is just the beginning

I believe that the name Boot Camp is a significant double entendre which references both the boot sequence of a computer (the dual boot) and also the beginning of something much more considerable — not unlike the boot camp attended by members of the armed forces. I don’t actually think or hope there’s much related between Apple and the military… Though you might look at this as training for the battle ahead.

Running Windows and Mac applications on the same machine has many benefits. I don’t think I really need to spell it all out, but just for kicks imagine you are one of the following – A recent iPod purchaser on a Windows Machine loving Apple, but not sure you’d be comfortable in Mac OS; A Gamer; a Corporate user; a casual consumer looking to upgrade your computing style.

While Dual-Booting allows for a pretty conservative approach to checking things out (separate real machines), the real path to seemless integration of multiple OSs comes through Virtualization. This is something that has been mainly used on the server side of life, but is very seriously making a move on the desktop. As Intel rolls Conroe out this fall, and Apple rolls out 10.5 virtualization will very likely reach a consumer mass market.

While Virtualization is very complicated, imagine NOT having to reboot your system to run Windows or switch to Mac OS, but rather simply clicking an app and having it run. The way virtualization has worked in the past has enabled a special window to open (if you’ve ever used VirtualPC) which then runs the new OS. Apple actually has some interesting related experience which many early users of OSX are quite familiar in Classic.

Classic just ran. You could choose to have it start on boot or on demand and when you clicked a Classic (OS9) application, it just worked. Running Windows (or Linux) this way is clearly more complicated, but I don’t think it’s impossible and actually if the goal is to make it easy for things to operate – Apple could certainly make the process transparent better than most.

There are definitely some interesting things brewing and I can’t wait to see how it all actually works out. If Apple succeeds in enabling a virtual windows system within OS X, there would be ZERO obstacles to choosing Apple – with the one exception being cost, but then you’d be getting the most superior hardware design along with the most advanced operating system — not too unlike today, but with even more capabilities.

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