Apple announced a public beta of Boot Camp, which helps you install Windows XP on your Intel based Apple hardware. This includes drivers for graphics, networking, audio, wireless and bluetooth.
I’ve got to get this out of my system first: This Is So Freaking Cool! Okay, I feel better now.
With Boot Camp you can dual boot between Windows XP and Mac OS X. Details are still coming out, but I’m going to guess that this contains updates to EFI to support BIOS dependent operating systems. If that is the case then you should be able to multi-boot between other operating systems also (like FreeBSD or Ubuntu). Perhaps even Windows Vista when it is released. If you combined this with something like Mac Drive 6, which allows Windows to read/write to HFS/HFS+ (the Mac OS X file system), you’ll have a pretty reasonable setup.
Boot Camp will be included in the next version of Mac OS X (10.5) Leopard. I don’t believe that a release date has been talked about yet for Leopard, but we are supposed to hear more this summer (August). This also brings into question the rumors about virtualisation software being included in Leopard. How far with Apple really go with allowing/supporting other operating systems on their hardware? As much as I’d like to see this rumor be true, part of me things that it isn’t likely that Apple as a company would be thrilled with the idea. They have to draw the line some where on encouraging people to use non-OS X software.
At this point I see Boot Camp as good news for Apple and consumers. For die hard Apple fans this won’t change anything, but it makes for one more reason for Windows users to make their next computer a Mac instead of a traditional PC.