Apple Boot Camp Review

Apple's decision to move its Macintosh computing platform to Intel processors has opened up a world of possibilities, none more obvious than the release this week of a beta software wizard called Boot Camp. This elegant little application allows Intel-based Mac users to repartition their hard drive, install Windows XP, and dual boot between XP and Mac OS X 10.4 "Tiger" (see my review). A future version of Boot Camp will be included with Mac OS X 10.5 "Leopard," due sometime in 2007. That version, presumably, will support Windows Vista as well.

Back in January, when Apple announced the first Intel-based Macs, I purchased the top-of-the-line iMac model. This beauty--which set me back just over $2000--featured a 20-inch widescreen display, a 2.0 GHz Intel Core Duo processor, 1 GB of RAM, and a 250 GB hard drive. The idea at the time was that I would dual boot between OS X and Vista: Surely, I thought at the time, someone will get this all working soon.

It never happened. And when Microsoft surreptitiously revealed (see my news report in WinInfo Short Takes) that it would not be supporting the EFI-style BIOS used by the iMac (which, previously, it had said it would support), it seemed like the dream was over. I offered my iMac for sale. On the day it was purchased, however, an enterprising hacker won over $16,000 when he figured out how to dual-boot OS X and Windows XP on the Intel-based Macs. Ironic? Not really. But I shouldn't have given up so easily. Clearly, there would soon be elegant ways to switch been OS X and various Windows versions on the new Macs.

Little did I know that one such solution would come from Apple, though the company was rumored to be working on virtualization software that would allow OS X and Windows to run simultaneously on the same hardware. In early April 2006, Apple announced Boot Camp. It is their solution for dual booting between Windows and Mac OS X.

Why Boot Camp?

One might wonder why Apple would create such a thing. After all, with barely 2 percent of the market for computer operating systems, should Apple be trying to win market share for Mac OS X and not offer a way for Mac users to run Windows? Not exactly. Unlike Microsoft, Apple doesn't actually make a lot of money directly from sales of its OS. Instead, Apple makes most of its money--even now, in the heady days of iPod supremacy--by selling computer hardware. So one might think of Boot Camp as a win-win. Apple wins because a much wider audience of users can now consider its Mac systems, secure in the knowledge that they can run Windows if they want to. Microsoft wins because these users will still be using--and paying for--Windows. And best of all, we as users win, too, because now we can have the best of both worlds: the elegance of Apple hardware coupled with Windows, the operating system that runs all those applications we want to run.

Some Mac users don't see it that way. They'd like you to believe that Mac OS X is all anyone would ever need, and they're actually quite a bit distressed that anyone would want to run Windows on a Mac. Get a life: This software will open up the world of Apple to a much wider audience and if OS X is as great as they think it is, surely some of those people will start spending time with OS X instead of Windows. I can't really see the issue there.

I would like to stress one thing, however. Apple's hardware isn't perfect. If a typical Windows user is going to go Mac, so to speak, they're going to need to know that there are trade-offs, because Apple typical choose style over virtually every other consideration.

This focus on style means that Macs lack some of the key features that most Windows users take for granted, because these features would clutter up Apple's clean designs. There are no integrated media readers on any Macs. The notebooks lack docking or port replication options. You also don't get a lot of options when ordering online, so I hope you want integrated wireless, Bluetooth, Firewire, and all that stuff, because you're paying for it whether you need it or not. Macs tend to be more expensive than PCs, though one might argue that you get what you pay for.

That said, there are advantages to Macs. The hardware is undeniably gorgeous and well made. Apple offers great support, and there is a sense of community that occurs when you purchase a Mac that you just don't get from Dell or HP. This extends from the knowing looks you get when you crack open an Apple laptop on the road to the almost smug feeling you get when you walk into an Apple retail store. You're part of something, for better or worse.

One other thing to consider is the alternative. Now that Apple's operating system runs on Intel hardware, what's to stop the company from letting users install Mac OS X on any PC? As noted above, Apple actually makes much more money from hardware than it does from software, and given the rampant piracy in the PC market, it's likely that any move to open up Mac OS X like that would do little to help Apple's cause. Overall, Apple did the right thing: Under the current plan, it's likely that its hardware sales will go up. And as people discover Mac hardware, they could very well be tempted to consider using OS X as well.

Installing Boot Camp

To test Boot Camp, I purchased a base Mac mini system, which consists of a 1.5 GHz Intel Core Solo processor, 512 MB of RAM (64 MB of which are dedicated to the video display), 60 GB hard drive, an integrated Intel graphics chipset, built-in Ethernet, 802.11abg wireless networking, and Bluetooth, and a combo (DVD/CD-RW) optical drive. It's a cute little system, and comparable to a very low-end PC. While this isn't the type of hardware that I'd run personally, it's virtually silent and is housed in an attractive little enclosure.

Before I could install the Boot Camp public beta, I had to install a firmware update. This process was confusingly communicated during the Boot Camp install process (Figure), which I didn't appreciate. The online docs suggested going to Apple's support page and typing in a search string, which I did, and I eventually did find the proper update, which came with its own confusing set of instructions (Figure). So much for the Mac's ballyhooed simplicity.

After installing the update and rebooting, I was ready to roll. The Boot Camp application proceeds with a wizard-like step-by-step process that walks you through creating a CD with XP drivers for the Mac hardware, partitioning the disk, and then installing XP. In case it isn't obvious, that means you need to be ready with a blank CD, an XP install CD that is integrated with SP2 (see my instructions), and a valid XP Product Key.

In the first stage of the Boot Camp process, you burn the drivers CD (Figure). This takes several minutes and is pretty straightforward. Then, you're confronted with a graphical representation of the partitions that will be on your hard drive, giving you the ability to choose how much space you'll commit to each operating system (Figure). Once you've chosen the sizes, you click the Partition button and Boot Camp resizes the Mac OS X partition and then creates a new partition for XP. Then, you're prompted to insert your Windows XP with Service Pack 2 CD (Figure).

When you press the Start Installation button, the Mac reboots into XP Setup, which is a bit odd (Figure). XP install time is typical on the Mac mini, about 45 minutes. When Setup is complete, you reboot into XP, which is just weird (Figure). A quick glance at the Device Manager shows that a number of devices were not recognized by XP Setup (Figure). However, when you insert the XP drivers disk you created earlier, an automated routine installs drivers for most of the unrecognized hardware (Figure). When it was done, there were still three unrecognized devices, which are labeled USB Human Interface Device, PCI Device, and Unknown device (Figure). I still haven't figured out what those are, but everything in the system appears to be working properly.

Using Boot Camp

At this point, you're free to use XP, installing updates as needed, activating it, and installing and running applications. Everything appears to work fine, and as I said, the performance is on par with that of an entry-level Wintel notebook. But the interesting thing about Boot Camp, of course, is that it lets you switch between Mac OS X and Windows XP at boot time. Let's see how that works.

If you're familiar with dual booting on a PC, you'll be surprised by the minimalist nature of Apple's dual-boot functionality. When you install two or more versions of Windows on the same PC, Microsoft creates a special boot-time menu that lets you choose which system you'll use. Unless you change it, the most recently-installed OS is the default choice, and the menu will count down 30 seconds, giving you time to make another choice. You can configure how this menu works pretty easily from System Properties in XP. On my main desktop, for example, I set the menu countdown to 3 seconds, made XP Professional the default choice, and have XP x64 Edition and the Windows Vista beta as alternative choices.

With Boot Camp, there's no menu. Instead, you are instructed to hold down the Option key when you hear the Mac's "bong" sound at reboot. You hold this key down until you see a graphical boot menu appears (Figure). There are two hard disk images on the menu, with the words "Macintosh HD" on one and "Windows" on the other. An arrow is pointing up at the current selection, and you can move the arrow from choice to choice with the arrow keys on the keyboard. You press Enter to make a selection.

This menu only appears when you press down the Option key as noted previously, and will otherwise cause the Mac to boot into whatever OS you chose last time. (Apple does, however, add a new Startup Disk control panel to XP that duplicates the functionality of the Startup Disk System Preferences panel in OS X; this allows you to tell it to boot into XP or Mac OS X by default without having to access the boot menu.) I feel this system is overly simplistic and non-discoverable, and should be made to work more like the Windows boot menu we get on PCs. But I would point out that this is just a first beta release, and it could get better over time.

Other Boot Camp Issues

Boot Camp supports only XP Pro and Home (with SP2), but at least one person, Barb Bowman, has gotten it to work with Windows XP Media Center Edition 2005 as well (see her instructions). You can only install one copy of XP on any given Mac: It's a true dual-boot and not a multi-boot.

From the Mac side, your Windows partition will show up on the Mac desktop as a hard drive called Untitled. You can navigate this disk using the Finder just as you would any other hard drive that's attached to your Mac, even if you chose to format the partition with NTFS during XP Setup.

From the XP side, the Windows-formatted partition appears as the C: drive, and you can't access the Mac-formatted partition. However, at least one third party tool corrects that omission: Mediafour, creators of the wonderful XPlay, which lets you use an iPod with Windows Media, have another product called MacDrive that lets you access Mac-formatted disks from within Windows. Mediafour was nice enough to send me an evaluation copy of MacDrive to test with XP running on Mac mini and it works like a charm: The Mac partition appears as a normal hard drive but has a little Apple logo next to it to indicate it's a Mac-based partition (Figure). You can navigate right in there as you would any other drive, and copy files back and forth between the partitions. Just be careful not to delete any of Apple's hidden "dot" files, which litter a Mac partition like confetti.

Because Boot Camp is a true dual-boot solution, only one operating system is running at a time, giving you the full processing power of the underlying Mac regardless of which system you're using. But a growing number of people are clamoring for a virtualization solution that would let you run Windows XP and Mac OS X, side-by-side, at the same time. The simplest such solution is a virtual machine, like Microsoft's Virtual PC. However, virtual machines run much more slowly than the underlying hardware, because they are software-based and run as applications under the host system. More problematic: Virtual PC will not run on Intel-based Macs.

A solution called Parallels has arrived to solve this need. Parallels is a virtual machine environment that ships in versions for Windows, Linux, and Intel-based Macs. I downloaded and installed the Mac version on the Mac mini, but my initial attempt at getting it to work met with a system crash. I have a few suspicions about this, but the biggest right now is that the base Mac mini I'm testing with only has 512 MB of RAM currently. According to the Parallels application, that means I can only dedicate 148 MB of RAM to the virtual machine version of XP. I'll examine this solution more in the days ahead, but virtual machines really aren't the answer, unless performance isn't a huge concern. And we're over a year off from the time when a true virtualization environment appears, if it ever does, for the Mac. Perhaps such a thing will be a feature of Mac OS X 10.5.

Conclusions

While Boot Camp isn't perfect, it's still a semi-miraculous solution that lets you dual boot between Mac OS X and Windows XP on an Intel-based Mac. That, folks, is what's known as the best of both worlds in these parts, and I'm personally very excited at the prospect of, or at the opportunity to, purchase Apple notebooks and desktops in the future. There's precious little chance I'd ever want to switch to Mac OS X, but I do need to maintain OS X systems for testing purposes. Life would surely be a lot simpler for me if I could run both Windows and OS X on the same hardware. I suspect the same is true for many other people as well. Rejoice.

--Paul Thurrott
April 7, 2006
Updated April 8, 2006