Even though PC and Mac will continue to argue over the merits of their chosen OS in Apple's commercials, in reality Apple has realized over the past few years that neglecting the majority of computer users is probably a bad idea. Even though Steve Jobs put it best, saying "It’s like giving a glass of ice water to somebody in hell," referring to iTunes on Windows.
A lot of Apple’s core software has slowly been ported over to Windows, like Bonjour, iTunes, and Safari, to name a few.The ultimate cross-platform integration, though, is Boot Camp, Apple’s built in utility to run Windows on your Mac.
However, since it was released as a standalone beta download in 2006, it has been rife with bugs. With each major hardware update, drivers become dated, and Apple has never given Boot Camp, or Windows drivers for that matter, as much attention as OS X.
The upcoming release of Snow Leopard with Boot Camp 3.0, ushers in a new age of running Windows on your Mac. Apple seems to be truly committed to providing an integrated solution for running Windows on your Mac.
After installing Windows 7 on our developer build of Snow Leopard, we came up with the most noteworthy aspects of the new Boot Camp software.
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1. Filesystem Drivers
Copying files between OS X and Windows on the same computer has always been an unnecessary hassle. Since Apple is the only hardware vendor that ships with pre-formatted HFS Journaled drives, nobody has bothered writing any drivers for the HFS filesystem.
You could find workarounds, like copying files onto a USB drive, and then copying them back to the Windows Partition, but plugging the same USB stick into the same computer is, quite frankly, ridiculous, and moreover, wouldn’t be able to handle files larger than 4GB, because FAT32 was the only filesystem which both OSes supported.
There were also third party solutions like HFS Explorer, but with Windows 7, these stopped working, and they were clunky in the first place: you had to use the tool to copy the files onto the Windows partition before you could actually use them, unnecessarily cluttering up your hard drive with redundant data.
Now, both Boot Camp and Snow Leopard offer two-way filesystem support. What this means is that you can read NTFS natively in OS X, and read HFS Journaled natively in Windows Explorer. The only problem is that this access is read-only, presumably because you could accidentally modify key system files if you had write privileges.
However, you can still do several useful things with the read-only support. For example, we were able to import a 25 GB music library into Songbird in Windows, without moving any files.
2) Device Drivers
One of the biggest problems with Windows on a Unibody Macbook, previously, was that the new button-less track pad wreaked havoc on the Windows experience. Right clicking was near impossible, and tap to click was a nightmare. Furthermore, there were rarer problems (that we experienced) wherein conflicts between the track pad driver and the NVIDIA graphics drivers would cause random lockups and crashes.
Furthermore, in Windows, the AirPort drivers would cause random audio feedback and dropouts. With the new drivers included in Boot Camp 3.0, all of these problems go away, and Apple has increased the granularity of control for the track pad. However, there are still shortcomings. Though there is now a control panel to make the right side of the track pad secondary click, you can’t enable three or four finger gestures with it, meaning that the synaptic track pad functionality is unnecessarily crippled. They have also made Windows more compatible with Cinema Displays (an additional control panel), if you are so lucky to have one.
3) Increased Stability
With this release, Apple has committed itself to the next iteration of Windows, and has increased Windows 7’s stability under BootCamp. Even just making most things work under Windows would have been a major accomplishment, but the new features will make running Windows in a dedicated partition, versus a VM, a better decision than ever.
