The next major release of Mac OS X (codename Leopard) will come with the ability to run Intel Apple computers on either Mac OS X or Windows XP. “Apple has no desire or plan to sell or support Windows, but many customers have expressed their interest to run Windows on Apple’s superior hardware now that we use Intel processors,” said Philip Schiller, Apple’s senior vice president of Worldwide Product Marketing. “We think Boot Camp makes the Mac even more appealing to Windows users considering making the switch.”
Boot Camp, the feature that will support this, is a graphical assistant application that will create a second hard drive partition and let users burn CDs with all the necessary Windows drivers and then install Windows XP. But Apple is also quick to indicate that they do not want to sell or support Windows.
Boot Camp is currently available as a public beta and can be downloaded from www.apple.com/macosx/bootcamp.
This could be huge! But I don’t think it means that we will see OS X on non-Mac Intel systems any time soon!