With just three days to go before Leopard hits the scene, Apple's gone ahead and made Boot Camp unavailable to download -- a move that shouldn't surprise anyone, because we knew it was coming the day Leopard was announced. Tiger users with Boot Camp partitions who aren't ready to make the leap to Leopard can rest easy, however, since existing Boot Camp installations will continue to work fine -- but you'll still be riding dirty since the beta license technically expires on Friday with Leopard's release. Again, none of this is a surprise at all, but it still would have been nice for Apple to let people know they'd be pulling the download -- if you haven't snagged a copy by now, you're stuck paying the $129 for Leopard.

With the popularity of software like Apple's Boot Camp and SWsoft's Parallels, it's no secret that people want to run Windows and Mac OS on the same box, but who says that it has to be an Apple box? Well, Apple does, and the company has staunchly defended itself from the porting of OS X into the mad world of PC generics (not with total success, of course). But with mounting pressure from users and increasing software support from VMware and SWsoft, Steve Jobs might have to let go of his tight grasp on his shiny blue OS -- or at least turn the other way as OS X makes its way onto those vile, inferior, and cheaper x86 machines without his blessing. On that front, there's good news on the horizon: it turns out an upcoming version of Parallels just so happens to "make it easier to run Mac OS on a non-Apple computer," by some unknown but welcome means. VMware's own upcoming virtualization software for the Mac has been hamstrung by the trouble VMware has gone through trying to get Apple's blessing, and SWsoft's Parallels has been "crippled" in particular ways to make it more difficult to get Mac OS onto a non-Apple machine, but it seems like it's only going to get harder for Apple to have it both ways, and Intel's inclusion of virtualization in its own chips just compounds the "problem." Michael Dell has also reconfirmed his desire to pre-load Mac OS onto his own boring boxes "if customers wanted it and Apple would license it on reasonable terms," but that tantalizing offer doesn't seem to have swayed Apple yet.

[Via Techmeme]

It was perhaps one of the most significant events the PC industry has seen in the last decade: Apple opening up its hardware to Windows operating systems through its proprietary Boot Camp software. Not only did it allow Mac owners running Intel-powered machines to dual boot XP at will, it did so completely gratis (well, save for the cost of a Windows license). Unfortunately, the honeymoon may soon be over for Tiger users accustomed to the free boot loader: according to a report on MacScoop, Steve and friends plan to begin charging about $30 for the software once OS X Leopard is released and Boot Camp leaves beta for the greener pastures of commercial. For those Macheads planning to upgrade to Leopard, this wouldn't be an issue, of course -- the new OS will offer Boot Camp as one of its standard features. Still, if you're planning on keeping the old Tiger and your draft-N router around for awhile longer, it sounds like there's a good chance you'll need to squirrel away about $32 for the future: $30 for Boot Camp, and two bucks for the privilege of unlocking your wireless card's dormant 802.11n functionality.

[Via Slashdot]

You know, for all the talk about those greasy-hot, overclockin' MacBook Pros and their mysterious firmware updates, only now has PCMag completed a full review of the 17-inch flavor MBP. Alas, you won't find any real surprises in the review of this "astounding" 6.8-pound, easy toting 17-incher. Yeah, it does indeed get "too hot" by the reviewers standards, though apparently not as hot as the 15-inch model due to larger surface area to dissipate heat. And since this is PCMag, they installed Boot Camp, as you'd expect, "without a hitch" giving them the same "impressive" (for a Mac) gaming results in XP seen on the 15-inch sib. The reviewer calls the move to the 17-inch MacBook Pro a "no brainer" if you're a creative professional working heavily in graphic design or movie editing. However, if you're just looking for a "cool multimedia laptop" with plenty of screen then there are plenty of Windows-only systems available giving more bang, for that $3,099 as-tested, buck. Yeah, Mac fanboy enthusiasts, they're calling you out with that one. Still, PCMag slaps on a 4/5 editors rating which ain't too shabby, right?

We're not suggesting you try this at home (though we're also not suggesting that doing so will melt your MacBook Pro), but according to reports trickling out on the internets, the graphics processor in Apple's MacBook Pro is woefully underclocked. One user who tested his unit found that the MBP's Radeon X1600 came in at just 310MHz, compared to 470MHz on similarly equipped laptops from other brands (we almost said "similarly equipped Windows-based laptops," but, hey, we can't do that anymore, can we?). So, what's a gamer to do? Why, overclock it -- or reclock it, if you believe the unit is underclocked in the first place. Just boot your MBP into Windows (you do know how to do that, right?), run ATI Tools 0.2.5 and kiss your sluggish graphics (and probably your warranty) goodbye. Oh, and just in case you really don't know how to run Windows on your MBP, it turns out that at least one retailer is now selling models with XP pre-installed. Get one now, before Apple shuts them down.

Read - GPU
Read - XP pre-installed on MBP

Lest you think the team at OnMac.net (you know, the crowd that brought us the original Windows-on-Mac bootloader) would pack it in now that Apple has moved into their turf with Boot Camp, they've come back with a new hack that allows Boot Camp to be used to triple boot your Mac. That's right: no longer are you limited to a mere two operating systems when you start your Mac. Now, you can have a choice of OS X, Windows XP and the Linux distro of your choice (they went with gentoo). Their solution for this turns out to be fairly straightforward: rather than attempting to hack Boot Camp, they've chained the lilo bootloader to run off of the Windows loader. So, Boot Camp still shows you just two options -- OS X and Windows XP -- but if you choose Windows, you then get a second set of choices, which lets you pick Linux or XP. Now that this is done, we're waiting for someone to go to four: we really want to be able to boot into OS/2 Warp, and we suspect the solution is just around the corner.

We're a day late, but definitely not a dollar short this week. Just when we thought last week's trip out to Vegas for CTIA was going to be a bit of a bust, Apple goes and drops a bombshell on the industry in the form of the dual-bootin' Windows-enablin' Boot Camp beta software. In the mean time while we weren't pontificating what Apple's big scene-stealing news meant for the industry, we were poking around various handset makers' booths in search of such devices as Samsung's new T719, those Intel-based UMPCs, and the slew of sweet knockoffs TechFaithWireless had to showcase. We'll let you know how all that went (and more) on this week's show, so let's get to it!

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Hosts
Peter Rojas and Ryan Block

Producer
Randall Bennett

Music
J J J - 'Suits' in Japan

Format
41:51, 24.1 MB, MP3

Program
01:30 - Boot Camp lets Macs run Windows ... officially
14:09 - Hands on with some UMPCs
11:54 - A look at TechFaith's Moto Q knockoff
18:44 - Hands on with the RAZR V3m
22:01 - Samsung's T719
29:34 - Listener voicemail
36:15 - Engadget's involuntary entry into retail, and the week ahead

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Contact the podcast: 1-888-ENGADGET, Engadget (Gizmo Project) or podcast at engadget dawt com

Each week Ross Rubin contributes Switched On, a weekly column about the future of technology, multimedia, and digital entertainment:

"All right! Listen up, maggot! Welcome to Fort Dragg. I am your Commanding Microsoft Office-er Sgt. Pepper! How do you like that for trademark infringement, Apple Corps? I bet you came here today because you wanted to serve your computer company by beta testing Boot Camp? Well, let me tell you something. It ain't gonna be easy, you puke!

"Over the next 50 minutes, I will become your father, your mother, your Apple Specialist, your third-tier tech support person, and your best friend! Your heart may belong to Apple but your butt belongs to me! Your precious vendor won't support other operating systems, so you better be quicker than a FireWire 800 port, because if you ain't, you just may blow your disk up with your laser mouse.

"You come here as a sack of rotting apples unfit to touch a scroll ball! But I will tear down your hard drive into partitions until you cry. You will feel the burn like a driver CD. You will break like compatibility with classic Mac applications. Your identity will be so far gone that Spotlight won't be able to find it. Remember, there is no Windows ME in 'team.' If you can reset your system clock, you will leave with a time-killing, dual-booting, PC game-running machine! Do you hear me!?"

"Sir! Yes, sir!"

It was only a matter of time, but hey, for those closely monitoring the progress of Windows on Macs, it looks like peeps on the OSx86 Project forums have fully done the deed with Vista on an iMac. We're not going to get into the nitty gritty right here and now, but it sounds like the trick is to get Vista to stop trying to kill the OS X partition when installing with Boot Camp -- an urge in the installer that seems to be kept at bay by taking out the 200MB EFI partition. But if you're the type of person how wants to go for the gold and not just read about this stuff (which you probably are if you've gotten this far), we suggest actually looking into this a little further before knocking around partitions on your Mac just to get a beta Microsoft operating system up and running, mkay?

[Thanks, Mike and Jon]

While it probably won't get nearly as much hype as Apple's Boot Camp, the new beta of Parallels Workstation could actually prove to be more useful for Mac owners than the Apple boot manager. Parallels Workstation 2.1 Beta for Mac OS X creates a virtual machine on an Intel-based Mac, allowing the owner to install any guest OS compiled for X86, including Windows XP, Linux or MS-DOS (hey, why not?). This could allow Mac users who need to run an occasional Windows app to do so without having to reboot first -- though they'll need enough RAM and processing power to run both OS X and the virtual machine simultaneously. While other apps, including Microsoft's Virtual PC, have offered similar functionality for Power PC Macs, they required processor emulation, seriously undermining performance. By contrast, Parallels Workstation (available as a free beta) is said to provide "near native" performance, which might be enough for users who need to run Visio, Project,  or one of the many other Windows-only productivity apps -- though gamers will probably still want to use Boot Camp and keep just one OS running at a time.

[Thanks to everyone who sent this in]

While some early message-board reviews of Apple's new Boot Camp software -- which was announced earlier today -- seem to show that there are at least some hazards to running Windows on a Mac (see the pic at right, which is apparently one of the first Boot Camp-assisted Mac BSODs), The Wall Street Journal's Walt Mossberg has given the new boot manager a thumbs up. According to Mossberg (who was able to sneak a copy out of Cupertino a few days ago), after installing Boot Camp and Windows on an Intel iMac, Windows ran "blazingly fast," and all of the apps he tested ran "flawlessly." Mossberg put the install time -- including both installing Boot Camp itself and running the usual Windows installer -- at 57 minutes, 40 of which were claimed by the Windows setup program. Despite being generally pleased, Mossberg did find a few glitches, including having to reset the clock every time Windows is booted (apparently the system clock used by the iMac isn't recognized by Windows) and not being able to use Apple's iSight camera. All in all, however, Mossberg summed things up with what may soon become Apple's new tagline: "Whether you want to run Mac or Windows programs, an Apple computer may be the only computer you'll need."

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