Follow up to my previous Boot Camp post.
Eric over at Websnark dual-booted windows on his MacBook Pro and loaded up City of Villains. Evidently the result was even more impressive than he had anticipated.
I ran at full native resolution with all the bells and whistles. It was beautiful. Effects I’d never been able to see before showed up perfectly. In the middle of a gigantic fight with a giant monster (the Ghost of Scrapyard, for those playing along at home) I and two other Masterminds, along with a pile of corruptors and brutes, were all in a pack alongside about sixty minions, the giant monster, special effects of everyones’ attacks, at least twenty Henchmen and a giant blue glowing thing… oh, and explosions everywhere… at absolutely no choppiness nor loss of framerate.
This poses a quandary for PC-manufacturers, who have until now at the least dominated the gaming market through sheer windows-compatability brute force. And the gaming market makes up a very significant chunk of change in the computer hardware world. If Macs can, all of a sudden, do everything and play everything, and do it as well as Eric’s post describes, the PC is gonna be in a heap of trouble.
But of course, the real winner here is Microsoft. But then, that’s nothing new. In fact, according to Chris over at Apple Matters, this could be a bad move by Apple in general (though I agree with Eric that once the cat was out of the bag, Apple was beholden to make a move).
Why is Boot Camp the Apple equivalent of the New Coke fiasco? Well, because Apple is trading a little short-term gain for a long-term negative. At this moment in time, OS X does have a big lead over Windows XP but Vista is around the corner and it promises to address a lot of the problems found in Windows. So, for the next few months, people might buy a Mac with the idea of using it as a dual boot machine and get slowly but steadily sucked in by OS X’s superiority, but once Vista comes out that will likely change.
In fact, Apple has tried this before. In an effort to stave off dwindling sales Apple once offered Macs with PC cards in them. These were the equivalent of dual boot machines. The theory went that people would buy the machine for their Windows needs, but use the Mac OS more and more as time went by. Finally, unable to resist the allure of Mac OS you’d have a full blown Apple zealot on your hands. The reality was that Mac users bought the machines (they were brisk sellers) and got converted to Windows users. This was when the cutting edge Windows was 3.0, it is hard to imagine that Boot Camp won’t make at least as many Windows converts out of Mac users than the other way around.
Having Macs and PCs out there, appealing to different users with different needs, was much like having two distinct political parties. You were either a Mac user, or a PC user, and the line rarely blurred between the two. With Boot Camp, that line is officially blurred. Is it only a matter of time before we have essentially the same computers trying to sell themselves under completely different names?
Additional reading:
- Response to the Apple Matters post from Insert Title Here.
- The Times weighs in, and encourages discussion.
More additional reading (added 4/7/06):
- Daring Fireball writes an exhaustive if Mac-biased analysis.
- Tycho writes a non-exhaustive post with some good points.