Well who would have thunk it?
Seriously, this one came out of left field this morning. Right when we were celebrating the arrival of Windows XP on the Intel Macintosh, we were also resigning ourselves to it being a geekly, underground, hard-to-do kind of thing; the kind of thing that would require some bit of technical know-how, and the willingness to format your drive, partition it, reinstall both operating systems, and follow the massive instructions that were provided over at OnMac [ http://onmac.net/ ] after the contest was won. But here comes Apple to the rescue (we think) with their own, sanctioned, and somewhat-supported, way of accomplishing the the very same thing.
The public beta for the software that’ll allow you to do this, called BootCamp, is available for people to join and sign up for right now, and BootCamp is available for download as we speak. It looks like Apple is seriously looking to turn the ability for the Intel-based Macintoshes (the Intel iMacs, Mac Minis, and MacBook Pros) to boot Windows XP into a real selling point and advantage to the platform. It’s still a little short of John C. Dvorak’s prediction that Apple would soon be installing Windows on its systems instead of Mac OS, but who knows, it might not be too far off, especially if Apple offers bootcamp and dual-installs as an option when ordering a Mac.
Regardless, if you’re definitely an early-adopter and want to give this a try for yourself, head on over and sign up for the public beta. Let us know in the comments what you think about the whole thing and your experiences with Windows on the Intel Mac, if you have them! I’m thinking about giving it a go on my shiny new MacBook Pro, but I just set it up the way I like it….