I use both Mac and Windows (started on Mac first), and can see no useful purpose here.
Now, IF someone figures out how to run Mac OS X.xx run on a PC, THAT would be useful :)

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I don't have an Intel Mac yet, but when I do I won't bother running Windows on it.

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Or perhaps you already know this.

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T.H.E. ROCK
You can hack it.

COWBOY
I can. I-I...

COWBOY spits up some blood and dies in JOKER's arms.

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Are there other operating systems that will work on Macs?

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You might enjoy what they wrote in the April issue of Australian Macworld (BUZZ: Microsoft: Vista won't boot on Macs) :

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You can run Virtual PC on your Mac if your heart desires.

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The New York Times

April 6, 2006

Windows or Mac? Apple Says Both

By JOHN MARKOFF

SAN FRANCISCO, April 5 — After long imploring computer users to "think different" and defining the Macintosh as a lone bulwark against the Windows onslaught, Apple Computer has decided to open the gate, at least a bit.

Two decades after the first Mac arrived, Apple said Wednesday that it would offer users of its latest models a simple way to run the Microsoft Windows operating system as well as its own.

That means a single Apple computer will run programs written for either the Mac or Windows, though it will have to shut down one system to start the other.

The move was greeted with exuberance even among the loyal cult of Macintosh enthusiasts who sustained Apple through many bleak years before its resurgence on the strength of its iPod music player. Its sleek machines have long been objects of consumer lust but are frequently passed over in favor of more pedestrian computers that run Windows, leaving Apple with about 5 percent of the personal computer market.

Wall Street analysts and computer industry experts also greeted the move as an obvious and potentially lucrative one for Apple, whose stock jumped almost 10 percent, ending the trading day at $67.21, up $6.04.

"The religion has changed," said Charles Wolf, a financial analyst at Needham & Company, a New York investment firm. "Apple is saying we have the chance to really build the Macintosh platform, and although there are risks, we're going to do it."

Indeed, although much is still made of the rivalry between Apple and Microsoft, and Steven P. Jobs, Apple's co-founder and chief executive, has continued to poke fun at Microsoft's struggles to modernize Windows, Apple has steadily moved to accommodate itself to the rest of the computing world.

Shortly after he returned to Apple in 1997, Mr. Jobs persuaded Microsoft to commit to make its Office software run on his computers and invest in his company. More recently, in 2003, he developed a version of his popular iTunes software that runs on Windows-based computers, giving him an opening to sell his wildly popular iPods to tens of millions of PC users.

Last year Mr. Jobs stunned the computer world by announcing that he would break away from his alliance with I.B.M. and recreate the Macintosh based on Intel microprocessors. It was the switch to Intel chips, long the standard in the Windows world, that opened the door to Mac-Windows harmony.

Through all of these moves, Mr. Jobs has managed to maintain his loyal base of customers. In fact the Macintosh religion can still be palpably felt among those who have remained loyal to the user-friendly computer even as its market share dipped below 3 percent.

"I love the Mac platform, I just hope I won't have to boot Windows even for Photoshop in a few years," Alexandros Roussos, a student at the University of Paris who is founder and editor of the MacCulture network, a group of Web sites for Macintosh enthusiasts.

Wednesday's move also won an important endorsement from Apple's other co-founder, Stephen G. Wozniak, who long ago left the company but remains a vocal Macintosh user and is idolized by the Mac faithful.

"It's a great thing for Apple," he told a reporter by e-mail. "I don't see the earth being rocked, but I can now recommend Apple hardware to a lot more people. One pitch is that if Windows gets too frustrating and unbearable and unsafe, then they can easily switch."

And Microsoft took the opportunity to salute the move, and itself. "Windows is a great operating system," a Microsoft statement said. "We're pleased that Apple customers are excited about running it, and that Apple is responding to meet the demand."

But even as it introduced the new capability, in the form of a free program called Boot Camp available for download, Apple tried with not-so-subtle body language to play down its significance.

Ever the showman, Mr. Jobs had been accused of excess in a recent product introduction, when he called reporters to Apple's headquarters on short notice for a presentation that included a leather glove to protect the finish of an iPod music player. But he was nowhere in evidence for Wednesday's announcement, which was made in a simple news release.

Word of the new offering was not visible Wednesday morning on the front page of Apple's Web site, which usually trumpets new products and capabilities. Instead, to obtain the Boot Camp software, it was necessary to navigate to an inside page on the Web site, where the download button was buried in a small box.

"Obviously ever since the Macintosh was moved to Intel, we've been getting this question from customers," said Philip W. Schiller, Apple's senior vice president for worldwide product marketing, explaining the Windows decision. "We always said it's possible."

Its muted announcement notwithstanding, Apple did a significant amount of technical work to make Windows run cleanly on a Macintosh computer. Part of the challenge was writing software modules called device drivers that connect the Microsoft software to the Macintosh hardware components like disk drives and video displays.

The Boot Camp system makes it possible for an Intel-based Macintosh to start up running either Windows XP or the Mac operating system, OS X. But one system must be stopped before the other can be started. Moreover, the user must also purchase a copy of the Windows operating system, at $199 or more.

Apple said Wednesday that it planned to make the Boot Camp capability a standard feature of the next version of OS X, which is expected to be introduced later this year or in early 2007.

Entering the mainstream of the computing world might undermine one of Apple's greatest selling points recently: that the Macintosh has been largely immune to computer viruses and other malicious software.

But because the Macintosh programs are shut down when Windows is running, and the Windows XP operating system does not know how to read and write information to the Macintosh file system, Mr. Schiller minimized the risk that Macintosh users might be taking in adding Boot Camp.

To be sure, this is not the first time that a Macintosh has been able to run Windows software. At one time Macs could be outfitted with special cards that ran Intel processors, and more recently several companies have produced software emulators that permitted Windows and Macintosh programs to coexist. But those were improvised solutions, with sluggish results.

Several companies, including VMware, a subsidiary of the data storage company EMC, are working on a technology that slips a thin layer of instructions underneath the existing Macintosh operating system. Such an approach would conceivably allow the Macintosh to run Macintosh, Windows and Linux programs simultaneously at full speed.

A number of analysts and software developers said Apple's greatest risk was that by opening its machines to Windows software it might inadvertently chill the enthusiasm of software developers for producing programs to run with the Mac operating system.

The potential downside was far outweighed by the opportunity to expand the number of Macintosh users, Mr. Schiller said, which is a central factor in attracting software developers.

"We thought long and hard about this," he said. "At the end of the day, the most important factor is Mac market share."

Mr. Wolf, the Needham & Company analyst, said that he had done several user surveys since Apple's shift to Intel to measure the potential sales increase from a Windows-compatible Mac, and that user enthusiasm had come back so strong that he had distrusted his results.

He said the biggest and most immediate increase would come in home and education markets in the United States; Apple has 14.8 percent of the elementary and secondary education market, and 5.1 percent of the home market, according to the market research firm IDC.

"It will double Apple's share in these markets," he said.

But in the ranks of Mac veterans on Wednesday, some remained leery of crossing the threshold.

"I had the Windows disk halfway into my MacBook Pro," said Jason D. O'Grady, the editor of Powerpage.org, a Macintosh enthusiast site. Then he recalled the reports he had heard about the risks of exposing unprotected Windows-based computers to the Internet and how quickly they could become infected.

"I thought to myself, 'Do I have an entire afternoon to waste?' " he said.

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Direct link to Apple's bootcamp page

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