Intrepid Boot Camp users have found ways to run Windows 7 on their Macs, but Apple hasn't officially supported their efforts thus far. With the release of Windows 7 today, Apple has announced official Boot Camp support is on the way, and plans to release an update before the end of the year. The update may be Snow Leopard only, however, and won't work on some older Intel Macs.

As MacRumors notes, there are already alternative ways to run Windows 7 on a Mac. You can go the virtual machine route with Parallels which supports 32-bit Windows 7, or wait a week for the newest version of VMWare Fusion, which will support 32-bit and 64-bit versions of the OS.

[via Engadget]

Apple Boot Camp version 1.2 beta is out, with some Windows Vista goodness (unless you think that's an oxymoron).

Boot camp now supports the 32-bit version of Vista, and includes a number of other updates, such as support for the Apple Remote, and updated drivers and documentation.

If you've got a previous version of boot camp installed, you don't need to uninstall it or repartition your hard drive (unless you want to resize it -- Vista's a bit on the chunky side). You will, however, need to update the Boot Camp Assistant and create a new Mac Drivers CD for installing drivers in Windows.

[via tuaw]

MacScoop reports that it has obtained a document suggesting Apple will release a final version of Boot Camp for Mac OS X Tiger this Spring -- and that it could cost $30.

At the same time, Apple will be launching Mac OS X Leopard, which will include Boot Camp, so if you want the option to dual boot two operating systems, you'll have dual choices: purchase a copy of Boot Camp or upgrade to Leopard.

The beta version of Boot Camp has been around since April of 2006, and should still work for free until September. The final version is expected to support Windows Vista.

This follows news that Apple will be charging users $2 to enable 802.11n support in the Apple TV, and that the company could be charging more than twice the manufacturing costs for the upcoming iPhone. But then, does anybody expect a company like Apple to make money by giving away software or selling hardware with narrow profit margins?

For those of you who have been holding out on Parallels, or haven't yet tried Boot Camp, VMware has decided to give you your Christmas gift a few days early and release the public beta of VMware Fusion. "What is this Fusion you speak of?" I hear you asking. It's VMware's foray into the Mac virtualization market, allowing you to run Windows, Linux, and likely most other x86 based OSes, along side your other Mac applications. Head over to their site to sign up and download the public beta today.

[Via TUAW]

Parallels Desktop, in my humble opinion, is a killer virtualization app that allows you to run virtually any OS, and even multiple OSes, in their own environments within Mac OS X. We've been following Parallels Desktop's development pretty closely over on TUAW, and today a new beta has been released with some rocking new features, including:

• Booting a Boot Camp Windows XP installation, allowing you to have the best of both worlds (Boot Camp is Apple's free utility for allowing you to run Windows XP on a separate partition - not in virtualization)
• Drag and drop files/folders between Windows and Mac OS X (previous, Parallels Desktop allowed you to set up a Shared Folder to accomplish this sharing task. This new feature, of course, is far cooler)
• Read/Write of aforementioned Boot Camp partition
• Parallels Transporter Beta - a new tool for migrating a Windows PC image, VMWare or Microsoft Virtual PC VM into Parallels
• Graphics performance and improvements (though, unfortunately, no full 3D hardware acceleration support - yet)

These Parallels guys just don't quit; since they introduced this Desktop product for Mac OS X, they have consistently added killer, innovative virtualization features like this. I can't wait to see full 3D support land "in a few months." I can't find an official announcement or link at Parallels' site yet, but here is a direct link to the 33MB download. If any of you try out the new features, share your experience in the comments.

Apple released a new version of Boot Camp on Monday. The 143 MB Boot Camp is Apple's software that lets Intel Macs run Microsoft Windows. This new version adds support for Intel based Macs, with easier partitioning using presets. Apple has also built support for iSight, microphones, and USB modems into the new 1.1.2 version. I guess the most interesting and important new addition to Boot Camp is the support for track pad scrolling on Apple laptops and the use of Apple based keyboard support which includes the Delete, Print Screen, Numlock, and Scroll Lock keys.

What do you think? Is the new Boot Camp a hit? How can Apple make it better?

Some users are more than a little upset that Boot Camp, the program Apple released last week to make booting Windows XP on Intel Macs, is rendering their OS X partitions inoperable. The software is, of course, intended to enable dual-booting between Windows and OS X, but some users reporting on Apple's support forums that after installing Windows they're unable to return to Apple's OS. A few users have discovered partial solutions, Apple isn't saying much about it yet, except that Boot Camp is beta at-your-own-risk software and as such is currently unsupported.

So you've put Windows XP on your Mac. What now? As someone who has to constantly switch between the two, I have a few tips. There are problems inherent in dual-booting, as opposed to running a virtual machine inside another OS (virtualization has its own issues of course). The big one for me is the issue of data storage. While I need to use USB memory sticks at work to move data from my iBook to a PC for printing, if it's a simple data sharing issue at home, this is easily remedied. I've been trying out FolderShare from Microsoft, and it works great. The OS X client is quirky, coated in brushed metal, but works like a dream. Right now it's in beta, and thus free, but expect this to change. Another alternative is a .Mac account and the XP utility for mounting your .Mac "drive." The nice thing about this is you can treat it just like a hard drive, but with all the latency issues you'd expect with a WebDAV data store... Still, there are plenty of online storage options out there.

If you want your XP to look more like a Mac, the contest winner appears to be FlyakiteOSX. Making it work like a Mac is a bit different. You know, Home is My Documents and so on, and each platform is totally different under the hood, yada yada. More important is to just understand the difference between the two and deal with it. Unfortunately, there aren't a lot of data points out there for switching from a Mac to a PC. Statistically that's just not a big pool to draw from... There's a mostly useless CNet article from 2002. And there's a much better piece from Rolf Howarth in 2004. Rolf made the switch to XP and documented the affair. Skip through the hardware issues to the software bits though. Again, it's a little out of date (XP handles wireless pretty well nowadays, in my experience)... Oh and Jeremy Zawodny switched to a PC laptop last year and appears to enjoy it. Anyway, there are lots of differences. Mostly it's a change of geography, with the need for some extra security thrown in. Instead of the menu bar up top, it's the tray down below.

If you're feeling homesick for something like Quicksilver, we've had this discussion a lot on Download Squad, plus other modifications. Choose your poison. If you want to enable Microsoft's version of Fast User Switching, you can. Downloading the Google Pack is helpful, as you get a Spotlight-esque search tool and a task switcher. Gnosis has a ton of XP resource links for you to peruse as well, which range from troubleshooting to massaging more performance out of the OS. One idea to feel at home in either OS is to use nothing but cross-platform, open source apps. It's an idea anyway.

Hey, it could be worse. Try switching from UNIX to Windows.

I come back from a walk in the park with my son, and what do I find? Apple has released Boot Camp, a tool for installing Windows XP on Macs. Sure, someone else beat them to the punch, but this is highly unusual for two reasons. One, Apple almost never releases a public beta (at least, not for free, as in OS X). Two, this is pretty much saying, "we know you still need Windows for stuff." Either way, it's most excellent for everyone. This move has some thinking OS X might be heading to PC's everywhere, in a sort of tit-for-tat bizarro-world twist. May we live in interesting times indeed. Is it just me or is the icon they're using a little off-putting?

[Via TUAW]