“Back in the mid-1990s when the mountains were taller and it was still OK to call somebody a liberal, your humble correspondent met at the corner of State and Madison with Michael Dell, CEO of Dell Computers Inc. ‘I’ve learned something about you mass market technology journalists,’ Dell said while I took notes with my reporter’s tablet laid out on a newspaper vending box. ‘You guys write almost exclusively about Windows and PCs because Apple has only a tiny market share, but then you all go home and use your Macs to write the story. You guys all love your Macs.’ I lost that reporter’s tablet but I’m pretty sure I remember the quote because it has stuck with me for all the years since. Dell felt that a Macintosh bias led to unfairly negative reviews of his products,” James Coates writes for The Chicago Tribune.

“Dell’s opposite comment came to mind big time over the past several days as we have covered Apple’s unexpected decision to sell Macs capable of running Windows as well as Mac OS 10,” Coates writes. “With Boot Camp running, a Mac can start in dual boot mode, giving the user a choice of whether to run OS 10 or Windows XP. Or a user can set Windows XP or OS 10 as the most commonly used program to boot up automatically, leaving it to the user to reboot later into the other operating system. Everybody agrees that Windows XP runs great on Macs with those dual-core Intel processors. It works far faster than Microsoft’s own software called Virtual PC for Macs that emulates an Intel chip on a Mac based on PowerPC and lets one install Windows and run Windows software. This works, but it is so slow that nobody’s going to use Virtual PC running in a window on the Mac more than is absolutely necessary. Boot Camp on a new Mac runs Windows as fast as any but the most supercharged PCs.”

“Then came Michael Dell with the other side of the story. Why not put OS 10 on a far cheaper Dell Windows PC instead of a costly Mac? You’d get the best of both worlds and shell out far less,” Coates reports. “In an e-mail to Forbes magazine, Dell said: ‘If Apple decides to open the Mac OS to others, we would be happy to offer it to our customers.’ Apple’s response was quick and negative. Apple will not sell OS 10 for installation in non-Apple hardware. It will sell software to run Windows on Macs but not the other way around. Will Jobs flip-flop on Dell’s offer just as he did when it was Windows on a Mac rather than Mac on Windows? I don’t care what Dell thinks about my ilk, I’m on his side now.”

Full article here.

MacDailyNews Take: This would be an entertaining story if you didn’t know that Michael Dell emailed the line “If Apple decides to open the Mac OS to others, we would be happy to offer it to our customers,” to Fortune’s David Kirkpatrick, not Forbes, in June 2005 or about 10 months before Apple released Boot Camp Public Beta, not after, as Coates implies. As Paul Harvey would say, “and now you know… the rest of the story.”

Related MacDailyNews articles:
Michael Dell say’s he’d be happy to sell Apple’s Mac OS X if Steve Jobs decides to license – June 16, 2005