Apple ‘Get a Mac’ web page pushes Parallels Desktop instead of Apple’s own Boot Camp

“I can’t even find Apple’s own Boot Camp mentioned on the ‘you can even run Windows’ page of Apple’s Get a Mac site – surprisingly, it’s Parallels Desktop that has the spotlight now,” David Chartier writes for The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW).

Chartier asks, “Could Apple be giving Boot Camp the back seat in favor of the no-rebooting convenience of Parallels Desktop? Or might Parallels be working with Apple on virtualization (or a buyout) for the upcoming Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard?”

Full article here.

[Thanks to MacDailyNews Readers “jk,” “LinuxGuy” and “Cathy” for the heads up.]

MacDailyNews Take: Indeed, Apple’s “You can even run Windows software” page of the company’s “Get a Mac” web section eschews Boot Camp in favor of Parallels Desktop for Mac. We always thought Parallels had better hurry up and make their money quickly now, before Leopard debuts. But, what if Apple’s working with Parallels to include the technology in Mac OS X Leopard? What do you think?

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Apple’s Boot Camp is first step towards Mac OS X Leopard’s inevitable support for virtualization – April 11, 2006
Mac OS X Leopard to contain ‘Red Box’ for natively running Windows applications? – June 23, 2005

45 Comments

  1. “But, what if Apple’s working with Parallels to include the technology in Mac OS X Leopard? What do you think?”

    If true, I think they’re going to be some wealthy motherf*ckers, that’s what I think.

    Damn, I wish I knew how to write code.

    Skipping trigonomentry class . . .

  2. It doesn’t mention boot camp but it does say:

    “Now you can take advantage of all the benefits of owning a Mac but still enjoy the convenience of starting up your Mac in Windows XP and running a Windows-only game or productivity application when needed.”

    … in addition to talking about Parallel.

  3. I think that Parallel’s Workstation is a shipping commercial product and Boot Camp is a pretty good proof-of-concept beta that is – in true Jobsian style designed to disrupt the dynamics of the marketplace.

    I’ll also put good money against doughnuts that Apple’s virtualisation technologies in Leopard will actually act as springboard for developers of appliance systems (like Axentra) to use the Mac Mini and other Macintosh models as compatible hardware platforms, in effect making the power management, network devices, I/O and other MacOS essentials available to the guest OS in some form or another through APIs that are well executed and complete.

    If that’s the case, Parallels, VMWare and others can compete on delivering high-performance virtualisation rather than who has either the “least-buggy” or “most complete” environment; in addition, a small outfit who wishes to create, for example, an embedded media center OS to run within the Macintosh environment will be able to concentrate on “their” part of the equation whilst leveraging OS X’s security and stability to link to the Internet for EPGs or whatever.

  4. But, what if Apple’s working with Parallels to include the technology in Mac OS X Leopard? What do you think?

    It wouldn’t be the first time a firm let someone else solve the problem, then buy the tchnology, or the firm. My guess is that Apple is giving Parallels a shot at making some money from their efforts, before releasing Leopard with a Parallels like technology incorporated into it.

    You gotta keep the developers happy, or they go away.

  5. My simple, and most obvious guess would be because Boot Camp is still a public beta so they don’t want to push it to hard. Just in case they get mass of bug issues after pushing it to everyone.

  6. You see what makes Parallels so powerful and useful is that it will run MANY flavors of operating systems, not just Windows XP.

    Of course the penalty is the performance is not so great as “BootCamp” because it’s still on only one core and the more a CPU has to handle the less it does well, much like Virtual PC is on PPC machines. However the performance is better than VPC on PPC because the Parallels/Core Duo is on the same x86 based processors.

    So with that we have this

    3D game/performance for Win XP only = BootCamp

    For everything else = Parallels Workstation.

    Now all we need is a Quad MacTel and a version of Parallels that will use all 4 cores.

  7. My simple, and most obvious guess would be because Boot Camp is still a public beta so they don’t want to push it to hard. Just in case they get mass of bug issues after pushing it to everyone.

    No “Boot Camp” was a direct response to Microsoft foot dragging and hobbling of Virtual PC on PowerMac G5’s. Microsoft can’t even get Vista out the door, so Apple took matters into their own hands.

    Same thing with Parallel’s, M$ is such a hobbled beast that they are unable to keep up.

    In fact Parallels is faster than Apple, Apple should have had this techonology back in Panther.

  8. This is an easy one:

    Boot camp is only BETA!!

    I have no doubt Leopard will have a Parallels-like multiple OS function. But, until it is a fully functioning and supported feature, Boot Camp will be waiting in the wings.

    Because it functions so differently, it is also very possible that the Leopard version of multiple OS functionality may not be 100% Boot Camp compatible. When you install Leopard and if you still want your Boot Camp’s XP, you may have to reinstall your XP in a different type of configuration.

    Regardless what happens, when Leopard is released, it will continue to make XP/Vista look like a bad copy of OS 9.

  9. i’m not sure how many developers Parallels employs, but it isn’t as many as Apple. They also aren’t absolute experts with the innards of OS X. I’d really like to see Apple buy out Parallels, give the company it due credit, and then unleash Apple engineers on the Parallels code. Make it run on both cores, integrate it into the system (i.e. for apps that you own both versions of, there could be an option to open it in OS X or Windows), fix all the driver bugs, etc.

    So, when Apple pushes Leopard out of the doors, it’s a seamless experience between the two worlds (three with Linux, though that’s much tougher to integrate as deeply). Afterall, that’s what Apple is all about, giving you the computer to do what you want, regardless of compatibility.

  10. I don’t think Apple will “work” with Parallels, I think they will offer their own virtualization software as part of Leapord. The BIG difference with Apple’s version will be graphics acceleration, the holy grail of virtualization software. Bootcamp is nothing more than a temporary solution for Tiger and a hint at what’s to come.

  11. Why are so many people assuming The Steve doesn’t have a virtual machine in the lab. Remember Mac OS X’s “double life”?

    The genius of Apple under The Steve is the ability to engineer terrific products and unleash them at the right time. I say The Steve doesn’t need Parallels technology; he has his own.

    ” width=”19″ height=”19″ alt=”cool hmm” style=”border:0;” />

  12. One more thing®

    Who here really believes The Steve wants to see windblows owning a Mac using dual boot? I can see SJ’s Leopard keynote demo now:

    SJ launches a virtual windblows machine. He runs various windblows apps like Auto CAD, etc. They are snappy. He starts quoting amazing benchmark specs. When all of a sudden the winblows virtual machine has a bunch of malware alerts popup. The machine is now some spam king’s bitch! The Steve says: “No problem, I’ll just trash this windows machine {dumps it in trash} and recover with the last working windows machine.”

    The whole thing is carried out with cool new quartz eye candy (spinning 3D spheres and such). The room erupts with applause.

    Rock on Steve!
    ” width=”19″ height=”19″ alt=”raspberry” style=”border:0;” />

  13. Bootcamp implies Apple will be supporting booting Windows, which is not something they are doing, want to do, or equiped to do. Pushing Parallels just shifts the burden of thousands of customer service calls to Parallels. Aside from that, it keeps OSX running on the box- preventing out of sight out of mind if a windows user boots directly to Windows. Good move on Apple’s part.

  14. Parallels is a lot friendlier to Mac users than boot camp is. In Parallels you can easily set up shared folders, you can use 2-finger scrolling if you’re a MacBook or MacBook Pro user, the sound drivers work correctly, copy-paste is supported across the virtual divide, and you’re still running Mac OS X – which makes Apple happy.

    In boot camp, you’ve lost your auto-screen dimming and backlit keyboard, browser performance is so high that it makes Mac OS X look sluggish, you can’t communicate with your Mac OS X partition, sleep isn’t very solid, sound drivers are goofed up (plugging in head phones does not stop the sound from playing through the speakers), and so on.

    I’d say that Boot Camp is your gaming solution, and Parallels is for everything else you need to do in Windows.

  15. We are not going to see graphics acceleration in something vitualized like Parallels, not even if Apple makes a competing product. Any on-the-fly translation layer from DirectX to OpenGL would incur such a large performance hit as to be useless. The two 3D technologies are too different to allow any efficient mapping at this point.

  16. I am not sure Apple is happy because of Parallels or others’ virtualization technology works well. If there is a good virt.software many developer think they doesn’t need to port or develop native Mac OS X application. I think Apple can do virtualisaton better than Parallels becasue of Apple knows everthing about its hw and sw. But Apple did only Bootcamp. Apple wants to use Mac OS X enviroment not any version of Windows. Bootcamp is less usable then Parallel solution, Apple wants this but not using Windows easily.

    Bootcamp – but virtualization too – is a short term possibility for average users.

  17. If Apple is working with Parellis, I hope they can come up with a way to get full hardware accelleration out of it for games. In it’s current state, you can’t use it for Windows games or other high end windows things, it’s fast enough for video and flash sure, but not 3d games. Boot camp handles this fine because it’s just running everything completely natively with full driver support, and is’t running two OS’s at once. For me at least, this is the only boon for running Windows on an Intel Mac, games and like 2 or 3 Windows apps I used before that I can no longer use now (I have a G4 mini, got it like 2 weeks before the Intel minis).

  18. I think it’s quite simply this. Why push something where someone could boot up in windows and never boot back into OS X when they could push a product that they HAVE to boot up in OS X but can easily have access to NECESSARY software in XP but maintain the majority of their time in OS X. That way they stay in OS X and get used to it and start preferring it more and more.

  19. It is interesting to see Apple promote Parrallels software over there own however it does make sense for three reasons. The 1st being on the new macs I would rather run Windows as a seperate application then give it full access to the Hardware. For every machine I have worked on that is a PC, Windows is the only OS that I have ever known to make hardware fail. 2nd reason is games. It would be possible for Parrallels to create virtualization for just gaming which would be sweet. Running PC games from the Mac side wihtout Windows. 3rd reason. What happens when windows starts to blue screen??? On the mac side just erase the partition that Parrallels sets up and start over – No reformt necessary.

  20. Quoted from [url=”http://www.apple.com/getamac/fast.html”]
    http://www.apple.com/getamac/fast.html[/url]:

    That means on such well-designed hardware, that MacBook Pro runs even some Windows software faster than PCs themselves, according to third party results. (They’re able to get these results with beta software from the next version of Mac OS X, Leopard. Apple Computer does not sell or support Microsoft Windows.)

  21. I agree with the Beta comments.

    I had a PC once with 2 OSs I can tell you that is pretty unpractical to have to reboot between OSs. It will get old pretty quickly. Go with Parallels. Most audio/video/photography apps are available natively for Mac Tell (except Adobe). If you want Windows to just play games I recommend that you apply the license fee towars a gaming console instead. For everything else Parallels would work ok.

  22. I don’t believe for one second that Parallels began to “blindly” code a product that Apple might incorporate into Leopard and wipe them out. I know it’s happened before like Konfabulator but this is too huge.

    I’m sure the guys and girls at Parallels know exactly what Apple has planned in the virtualization market.

  23. The idea that Apple is working on virtualization for Leopard is just wishful thinking in the Apple Rumor Mill. The only way Leopard is going to have virtualization built-in is if Apple buys it from somebody like Parallels.

    Tank – Apple did not rip-off Konfabulator. Dashboard has similarities with Konfabulator, but the technology is completely different. If anything, Konfabulator copied Apple’s DA’s from the original MacOS.

  24. Is everyone forgetting that Bootcamp is beta software, and is unsupported by Apple?

    They’re choosing someone else’s solution because it means that the other company gets to deal with the headache that is Windows users in need of tech support.

  25. I’m sure Apple is working with Parallels–this doesn’t mean that Apple will include some way to run Windows in Mac OS X. Instead, it will mean that Apple will introduce appropriate APIs for software which uses virtualization to make sure that Mac OS X is appropriately friendly, knows how to do things like share networking, etc.

    No, that doesn’t mean that you’ll go buy Leopard and be able to run Windows. It means you’ll be able to go buy Leopard, Parallels (or Virtual PC or Qemu, and Windows.

  26. I know this may be a little played out now that Parallels is the big thing on people’s minds, but I’m still partial to a Darwine situation, in which running Windows applications does not require the running of Windows itself.

    This is what I hope Apple will include in TenFive. It is a much more elegant solution, and elegance is tied in with everything Apple does, so in my opinion, it still is a strong possibility.

    Boot Camp is a beta, Parallels is not. Plus, Parallels makes it a little easier, being that you don’t have to restart to boot into another OS (however you pay the price in performance).

    I’m sure Apple knows what they’re doing.

  27. Noteworthy (but not spongeworthy):

    But I think it is totally spongeworthy!

    The Parallels concept of real-time dual, tri (or more!) booting is so much better than having to restart your Mactel every time as with Boot Camp.

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