Why your school doesn't want boot camp

Apple Reps know us by name? Wrong! We buy a decent amount of Macs and to be honest with you I cannot come up with the gentleman's name at Apple that was assigned to us. Even worse, we cannot buy them from our local Apple Specialist who we've had a relationship with for a long time. The guy's name there is Robert. We had lunch last week talking about Boot Camp.

I work for an lausd school and i would never install bootcamp on any mac computer but mine. Only so i could play some half life 2 during lunch time. The windows computers at my school are all terrible, i have spent hours and hours trying to remove spyware, extra installed programs, etc. When i would just want to reformat the HD.

As apple pretty much says, its for tech heads only and not for school use. Schools who have macs run better and there is no downtime with there computers at all. I had a hard drive crash once, and i just switched it out with another one that i had in the back that i use as a backup.

The thing is, though, I need Windows 5% of the time. I don't need to invest in a second insurance policy to maintain it, because I'm going to go the dark side so rarely it shouldn't matter. I want to boot up Windows when and only when I confront software for which there does not exist the Mac alternative of any sort. As an academic, occasionally I come upon datasets that were created with a primitive editor that is only executable through Windows DOS. I'm sick of having to come into my stupid office just to load up the data, pick the variables I need, only then to leave. The dual boot camp is simply a rip cord for most people. It is itself an insurance policy.

As a sys admin at an educational institution with 400+ Macs and only about 30-40 PCs, Boot Camp doesn't interest me. What DOES interest me is the developments going on with virtualization though. My PC users really only have PCs for one reason, and that's running the handful of PC-only account and fundraising apps.

If I could give them all macs, with an XP disk image that housed those apps that ran as a virtual machine, that would solve a ton of troubleshooting issues. Plus that way if the XP guest OS developed ANY issues, I could just delete it and replace it with a new one, since all their data for the XP apps is server-side. Bam!

Matthew Waters: No, I didn't. It's there.

Ron Martinez: A wise observation. It remains to be seen how many on-the-edge switchers this will affect, but I'd imagine that hardware sales will steadily increase as more and more PC users start needed a new computer. Most mid-level consumer are frustrated with Windows on a daily basis, and if given an opportunity to try something new without all the risk factors associated with it (being able to boot Windows if they decide OS X doesn't live up to all they've heard about it), they're likely to make the plunge. Somewhere along the lines, they'll realize OS X is a beautifully-crafted (even if they don't realize the robustness of it) operating system, far superior to Windows in many respects.

I met my girlfriend and one of her best friends only about 8 months ago. In that time, I've been able toeven if only through being a living testimonialshow them both that OS X rarely (if ever) gives you problems through basic daily use.

My girlfriend's best friend has stated on more than one occasion that her next computer will be a Mac. She's been searching for a month or two now for a low-priced, decent condition (possibly an Apple refurb) iBook. She's sold. She's even gone as far as to mentionwhen told about the ability of Macs to boot Windowsthat she doesn't care and wants nothing more to do with it, after all the trouble she's had with it over the years.

On the other side, there's a problem, though: my girlfriend's two brothers (age 10 and 14) are both HEAVY gamers. If Boot Camp becomes an extremely stable and functional 'feature' of OS X, perhaps even expanding to allow virtualization, I can't see why their family wouldn't purchase a Mac as their next desktop, no matter how far in the future that may be. The reliability of OS X, coupled with the compatibility of Windows, all in one elegantly-styled package? I'd sure as heck be on board, but maybe I'm a bit biased. ;0)

Irredisregardless [sic], the gap filled by Boot Camp is not something to be taken lightly. I believe the long-term effect of this will be huge.

Either way, though, can we go back to actual NEWS now? I've enjoyed (most) of it while it lasted, but I think we've all had enough with the varying opinions on Boot Camp from the TUAW bloggers. Leave the opinions to the comments, please.

What all this reminds me of is the Apple IIgs in the late 1980s. Apple created the Apple IIgs as the next generation Apple II. However, they made it backward compatible. It could also run Apple IIe software. The Apple IIe was, at that time, very prominent in schools and homes. Although for a time software developers began to make software specifically for the IIgs, in time they figured why not just make Apple IIe software since it would run on both machines. Consequently the Apple IIgs did not last very long. Could the same happen to Mac OS software since Macs now run Windows? I am not a software developer, so I can not say, but it seems like a good way to keep costs down.

Hard-headed and realistic comments. Hate to say it, but indeed this is how decisions are made in larger enterprises.

I do think, though, for a smaller institution (or business, for that matter) where PC and Mac apps are required or desired and budgets are tight, a dual boot Mac is a no-brainer.

The magic in all this, and the reason for all the chatter, is that Apple has swiftly and "magically" eliminated a perennial point of tension for any enlightened user: the need to choose. And at the same time, they have deftly positioned Windows as a feature, alongside Widgets, Spotlight, Expose, etc.

That's thinking different.

A Mac owner for nearly 30 years, I've spent hundreds of dollars on VirtualPC with Windows XP Professional installed to get functionality for the few times I'm forced the PC agony. Very few of my Windows applications have full functionality on VirtualPC. Why wouldn't I want Windows XP Professional running on my Mac to get performance that exceeds Windows XP Professional running most PCs?

Go Apple!

I think TUAW should only post things we know, because then there wouldn't be any room for argument!

No, I'm kidding.

I think bootcamp's cool and a welcome addition to the things you can do with a Mac.

However, as a student I had to deal with the Computer-Aided Engineering Network at the University of Michigan. As a student, not an IT person, although I wanted to work for them. They decided to turn all the Windows PCs into dual-boot Windows / Linux PCs. The windows part worked as well as it always did, which was surprisingly bad (the user's Application Data directors weren't zapped until re-image.. the machines would sometimes run out of disk space!). But the Linux half was also bad, because it just didn't work right half the time, and they seemed to have just slapped it in.

Having Linux instantly doubled the amount of work, because now every Windows license was now a Linux license, and every physical machine represents two unique problems even if they are all huge batches of supposedly identical hardware.

It never fails to amaze me. The writer (a self-described sysadmin) thinks boot camp is bad. EVERY new piece of SW or HW means more work for the sysadmin and support teams and usually a large number of them claim it's a bad move. Come on guys - the world does not stop changing - sysadmins better learn to change with it. China and India welcome change...