Out of the Box

Lifehacker has an update to its story about installing Mac OS X on a PC, creating what it calls a Hackintosh. Apple frowns on such a practice. Its tight control of hardware is part of what enables it to advance the platform with greater agility than Microsoft.

Comments to the story report generally good success with the hack. One commenter notes that he would use the technique to test-drive Mac OS X before buying a Mac.

With Apple taking the offensive against Vista, it might further entice Windows users to switch by allowing them to trial Mac OS X without having to buy into the hardware first. Like many Linux installation CDs, the Leopard trial DVD could run from the disc but not allow any modifications to the hard drive or allow consumers to save files.

On the other hand, there might of course be driver issues as well as sluggish performance coming off the DVD drive and the last thing Apple wants to convey to Windows users is a slow, unreliable experience. Insert your Microsoft OS joke here.

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Apple today announced the availability of Boot Camp on October 26th and will support the release with a multi-faceted marketing campaign stretching across at least print, the Web and of course its own stores. I wouldn’t be surprised if John Hodgman and “the other guy” reprise their roles in the long-running “Get a Mac” series of TV commercials as well.

One question I’d received from reporters is what happens to Boot Camp under Tiger, which is officially a beta. The straight scoop is that Macs configured with Boot Camp will continue to dual-boot and Windows partitions will remain intact. However, Boot Camp itself will expire at some point, after which the configurability, such as the ability to add new volumes, will no longer be available. This isn’t as ideal as continuing to support Boot Camp under Tiger, but overall is a pretty good compromise.

Now that Boot Camp will be release software, it will be interesting to see to what extent Microsoft will support Mac hardware. Until now, the official company line has been that Boot Camp was beta software and that it would have more to say once it was released.

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