Special Sauce

So, I was chatting with my accountant as he was finalizing the paperwork for this year's taxes, and conversation turned to the Mac (which he knows, based on my business purchases from last year, that I'm a user and fan of). After this last week's announcement by Apple that it's moving toward offering support for the Windows operating system on new Intel chip-based Macs (like the latest Mac Mini and the new MacBook Pro), he says that he's much more likely to buy a Mac when he needs a new computer. (He noted that he used a Mac during much of the 80s and 90s, but had to go full-on Windows because of his accounting software.)

And I gotta say, my interest in Boot Camp (the software that enables the Windows XP operability) is certainly piqued. I'm content to stick with my current PowerBook (purchased last Fall, and running on the old-school PowerPC chip). But I'm looking to create a media station for storing and serving up my digital audio library as well as videos. I've got a decent, older desktop PC that I'm thinking of networking in, and the bonus of that would be the availability of using a subscription music service like Rhapsody. But I much prefer the software and environment of the Max OS X operating system, and a Mac Mini and my PowerBook would communicate much easier and be far more integrated with one another. I'm going to give the former a chance (since I've got the box), but I'm still starry-eyed about the latter.

Now, I've seen a number of posts out in the blogosphere this last week that paints this as the last throes for the Mac. But based on my chat with my accountant and knowing other friends' proclivity toward the Mac, I think this will just open the market even wider. Here's FotF Jeff Carlson in one of his regular gigs as Seattle Times Practical Mac columnist (a duty he shares with another FotF, Glenn Fleishman), with some thoughts on Boot Camp:

Boot Camp is for those people who need to occasionally run programs or access services that are unavailable on the Mac. Apple isn't selling or bundling Windows, and Boot Camp offers only dual-boot capability: You can start up the Mac in either Mac OS X or Windows, but not both.

So is this a baby step toward Apple selling Windows machines? Not likely. Apple's computers are beautiful and induce envy in even the staunchest Windows lover, but day to day you don't operate a computer, per se, just as you don't go home and eat a table for dinner.

Even given Apple's engineering feats (of which I've written before; see "Apple takes Power Mac G5 up a notch," from Oct. 29), it's Mac OS X that delivers the Macintosh experience.

And that's really the crux of it--the Mac OS is so f'ing easy to deal with and elegant that ultimately using Windows will feel like a chore (for those who choose the binary Boot Camp route of an Intel-based Mac).