We've been saying it for years, but everyone thought that we Mac-heads had a chip on our shoulder from the once-sour relationship with Microsoft. Finally, however, the truth has come to light; a group manager from Microsoft has gone on record and admitted the source of some of Windows 7's prettier bits and pieces.

Simon Aldous sat down with PCR for an interview and when he was asked to comment on the agility of Redmond's latest operating system, he had this to say:

"What we've tried to do with Windows 7 – whether it's traditional format or in a touch format – is create a Mac look and feel."

While I am glad that people at Microsoft are finally accepting the superiority of OS X, it still stung a little when Simon started to backtrack saying that Vista was more stable than OS X.

Update: It looks like the Windows team had a few things to say about Simon's earlier remarks, noting that "his comments were inaccurate and uninformed." It is, in my opinion, difficult to deny that the OS X Dock has had a positive impact on how people use their computers -- whether they be PCs or Macs. That being said, I'm glad Microsoft didn't take this one lying down.

[via Engadget]

Domestic TV watchers who tuned into the NBC Thursday comedy lineup or the Yankees-Angels playoff game on Fox were treated to three new Get a Mac ads in heavy rotation tonight, all focused on the launch of the latest Windows version. You can watch all three ads (Broken Promises, Teeter Tottering & PC News) over on Apple's site.

While these ads are pretty funny (Broken Promises, in particular, features some excellent work by the wardrobe department), it's not clear if the message of upgrade challenges from XP to Win7 is going to resonate. Apple's marketing team may describe Windows 7 as 'antiquated tech,' but the big M clearly is expecting plenty of PC users to buy brand new machines to run Win7 rather than upgrading their old gear. Will they consider a Mac as part of the mix? We can certainly hope so -- but by all indications, Windows 7 is no Vista, and it's quite a bit harder to sell against an operating system that doesn't actively shoot itself in the foot. Heck, it's possible that there may even be a few Mac diehards in the opening day lines to buy Win7.

Thanks to everyone who sent this in.

Anil Dash has described how to run Windows 7 on a Mac running OS 10.6 -- as a virtual machine -- for free (after you buy Windows 7, of course). It's not very tricky and, according to Anil, works well. Start by installing Windows 7 in Boot Camp and wait while it grabs the necessary drivers (the duration of this process will vary).

Next, eject the Boot Camp disk and enter a few simple Terminal commands. You'll also need VirtualBox, which is free and open source virtualization software. Once you're done in Terminal, launch VirtualBox and browse to the file you made with Terminal. Read Anil's article for the details.

As today is Windows 7 launch day, we're interested in hearing from anyone who has installed it on their Mac, either via Boot Camp or virtualization.

For more, read Christina's post on installing Windows 7 on a Mac (at Download Squad), or Steve's take here. You can get your absolute fill of Win7 coverage all day today at DLS.

One week from today, Microsoft will try to shake the stink of Vista. BusinessWeek reminds the world that Microsoft is set to launch Windows 7 on October 22nd. I've got the day free, since all of my invitations to Windows 7 launch parties seem to have been lost in the mail.

As the spotlight shifts toward Redmond, WA, Apple Senior VP of Worldwide Product Marketing Phil Schiller says that Apple sees "a very good opportunity" in the Windows 7 noise, in an interview with Business Week's Peter Burrows.

While no one expects Windows 7 to be as poorly received as Vista, the new operating system will mark the first time in a long while that millions of PC owners will start looking seriously at replacing existing machines, especially with so many PC-people having skipped the purchase cycle when Vista came around.

And there's where Apple gets them. Or tries to, anyway.

Apple is likely to aim new ads at PC users, trying to pull them to the Mac side in the coming days. The ads will probably hit familiar points, such as the susceptibility to malware worn by Windows, and extra programs buyers get with a Mac out of the box, like iMovie and GarageBand.

VMware Fusion 3 features highly improved Snow Leopard support. Most notably, Fusion now sports native 64-bit compatibility and support for the 64-bit kernel. What this means for the average user is improved performance for both the host and guest operating systems.

Further, with support for OpenGL 2.1 and DirectX 9.0c Shader Model 3, gamers will now be able to play more demanding 3D games without the use of Boot Camp. Fusion 3 will also work beautifully with Microsoft's latest operating system by enabling the full Windows 7 experience, side-by-side with your Mac via Unity, complete with Windows Aero and Flip 3D.

VMware Fusion 3 is available for pre-order now and will be on store shelves October 27. Suggested retail price is $79.99US and on the day of launch upgrade pricing of $39.99US will be available for existing customers with previous versions of VMware Fusion.

I use Fusion 2 when I'm at my home office and while the performance has been good, I am really looking forward to Fusion 3's 64-bit support. Any other Fusion users out there, how will you make use of VMware's latest foray into the desktop virtualization game?

Welcome back to Ask TUAW, our weekly Mac troubleshooting Q&A column. This week we've got questions about backing up photos, removing a Boot Camp partition, Snow Leopard and Windows 7, Bluetooth menus, iPhone search results and more.

As always, your suggestions and questions are welcome. Questions for next week should be left in the comments. When asking a question please include which machine you're running and which version of Mac OS X (we'll assume you're running Leopard on an Intel Mac if you don't specify). And now, on to the questions.

Han asks:

What is the best way to archive photos without using iPhoto? I have about 100 GB of original photos and I have been saving them on my NetGear ReadyNAS Duo. Sometimes I leave the photos in the folder and just copy it to the NAS or sometimes zip them before I put it in the NAS. What I am worried about is if I zip the folder and somehow the zip file itself gets corrupted, is it harder to recover them? Is it better to just not zip and leave it as a folder then copy it to the NAS?

Because photos are pretty important and almost impossible to recreate I take my photo workflow and backup seriously. First, I never import photos directly into iPhoto and instead, using a card reader, copy the files to a folder I have labeled specifically for these photos which resides in my main "Photography" folder.

It's a common theory that Apple is a "hardware company" not a "software company." What does that mean? Doesn't it actually sell both?

The idea is that Apple uses software to push more hardware sales. If Apple was a software company, you wouldn't see the fantastic and very useful iLife bundle of applications included for free on every new Mac, including the el-cheapo Mini. Instead, they might decide to charge $99 for it, or worse, break it up into pieces and distribute it as separate packages, each with its own price.

Snow Leopard's price also seems to support this theory, especially when contrasted to Microsoft's pricing model. Any "dot-oh" operating system upgrade priced at $29 is simply amazing. And given the fact that you can upgrade a whole home or small office full of Macs for less than the price of an Xbox 360 game...well, that's just a special kind of awesome. The main OS competitor, however, has graciously offered its upgrade, similar in "just fixing stuff and making it run better" nature to Apple's update, at the low, low price of $129. Ouch! At least you can save a substantial amount by buying Microsoft's family pack at a tick under 150 bucks, but that discount will only get you three copies instead of Apple's five. And it's still three times the price of Snow Leopard's bundle!

But I realized something interesting about the whole "hardware company vs. software company" argument. As a Mac convert, I've noticed that I think quite a bit less about the hardware than I do the software. In the PC world I still live in, we talk about processor benchmarks, motherboard options, frontside bus speeds, and other Ambien replacements. However, when I talk Mac, I'm often concerned much more with the software it's running, what OS version is installed, and where I can find a free app to do what I need.

After years of being thrown table scraps in the way of a few bucks off the price of Windows for the "upgrade" versions, I happily paid the $49 for my Family Pack of Snow Leopard earlier this week.

Sure, there are a few people that say things like "Why should I have to pay Apple to fix the mistakes they made in Leopard?" On some level, that might be a valid argument, but let's set that aside because there's a better point to be made.

The handful of new features in Snow Leopard are well worth the price Apple is asking. Included are most of the QuickTime Pro features, text substitution, more expansive Spotlight integration, Expose in the Dock (sounds like a band name... hehe), and a host of other little improvements. Some of these can be added today via third-party apps, but those apps (*gasp*) cost money. Bundle all of those up, and $30 for the whole slew of apps would be a sweet deal in and of itself. I know I would spend half that just to get the new slider in Finder windows that changes the size of thumbnail previews!

Heck, the reported speed improvements make the shipped price of $29 per machine price (which, remember, drops to below $10 with a Family Pack) a bargain. Even if the overall increase turns out to be low, say 5% or so, the price of the OS upgrade turns out to be a good deal. Where else are you going to spend so little money for such a similar boost in speed and snappiness?

And remember, that $49 lets me upgrade five Macs, not just the one PC I can update to Windows 7 for over two and half times the price! (Microsoft is asking $129 for the Windows Home Premium Upgrade.) A friend of mine was excited to find out that he only needed to spend $150 to upgrade his three Vista machines to Windows 7, using Microsoft's family pack. I understand his enthusiasm: I'd gladly pay $150 to get rid of Vista, too!

Seriously, Apple did a very smart thing when it priced Snow Leopard below the cost of a typical family visit to the movies. If it would have asked the normal going rate of $129, I would probably have still upgraded, but I, along with millions of other users, would not have been happy about it.

Keeping the iPhone 3G around at $99, lowering the prices on new Macs, and now the awesome deal on Snow Leopard... I think Apple may, just may, be "getting it" when it comes to pricing lately.

Sometimes you have to use Windows. Supporting clients in multiple-OS environments makes this a necessity for some Mac users, while others want to run applications that are available in Windows only. You can get a preview of the latest flavor of Windows, Windows 7, by running Release Candidate 1 of the new OS either in a virtual environment such as VMWare Fusion, Parallels, or VirtualBox, or in Apple's own Boot Camp. Christina did a thorough rundown of the options for running Win 7 on Mac back in January.

Of course, you may not own Fusion or Parallels, and perhaps you don't want to have to boot into Windows separately. In that case, you can download a copy of Sun's VirtualBox application (it's free) and then download a copy of Windows 7 RC1 from the Microsoft website (it's free, too!). Follow these detailed instructions or watch the video, and you'll have a free way to test Windows 7 until at least June 1, 2010. Windows 7 will shut down after every two hours of use after March 1, 2010, which is Microsoft's subtle way of telling you to buy the OS or update to a later build.

If you're a VMWare Fusion user, the VMWare team has instructions and a video available here. Want to try out Win7 RC1 with Boot Camp? There are instructions here. For Parallels 4 users, I was unable to find a good set of instructions, so if any TUAW readers can provide me with a link, I'll update this post.

How is Windows 7 RC1 as an operating system? It's faster than Windows Vista on my 3 year old iMac, and some features look surprisingly Mac-like. I'll leave it to you as an exercise to see how much you like or dislike it.

Raise your hand if you remember when a Mac was a Mac and a Windows machine was a Windows machine, and never the twain shall meet. I sure do.

Change has come.

Our own Christina Warren has written an exhaustive set of instructions for installing Windows 7 on a Mac over at our sister site, Download Squad. Windows 7 is in beta, so don't try and use it for any mission-critical tasks. Meant to be an incremental update to Vista (Snow Vista?), the current iteration of Windows 7 includes changes like a redesigned taskbar, enhanced touch performance and improvements when run atop multi-core processors.

While Intel Macs can run Windows 7 via Boot Camp, Christina points out that virtualization is probably the best bet for most users. She described how to set up an installation with VMWare Fusion 2.0, Parallels 4.0 and VirtualBox 2.1.2 (and the VMware team has posted a guide of their own for Win7 on Fusion).

If you're a Mac user who keeps Windows around for compatibility testing or that one proprietary Windows app you can't do without, and you're just itching to try Windows 7, this is the tutorial for you. If you're wondering what the fuss is about over on the Microsoft side, Engadget's deep dive on Windows 7 is a good place to start.