Everyone is missing the real news!
Posted by Stephen Waits Fri, 07 Apr 2006 16:43:00 GMT
Boot Camp, Boot Camp, Boot Camp. We’ve seen an awful lot of news in the last few days about Apple’s release of dual-boot support. While yes, that is good, even surprising news, it’s not the real story.
The real story is from a company other than Apple, that’s released a product (in Beta) which is far more useful than Boot Camp. What product is that? It’s Parallels.
What is it? It’s virtualization software, like VMWare. It let’s you run any number of Operating System installations, all at the SAME TIME, at near native speeds. That means that you’re not limited to just running XP, or whatever Apple decides to support with Boot Camp, but you can run Linux, FreeBSD, even OS/2 - again, at the same time!
Again, this is not emulation, so all of you old school Mac people who are unwittingly a bit technically challenged should not be comparing this to Virtual PC or whatever other emulation package you used in the past. This is virtualization. The OSes you run inside of Parallels will be running at near native speeds - in other words, at almost the same speed as if you were actually running that OS on its own!
So, the real story isn’t dual booting - it’s virtualization. If you have an Intel Mac, please go try Parallels today. At a minimum, go check out the screenshots!
No, I don’t work for them, I haven’t even tried it as I don’t have an Intel Mac – yet. But this is what I’ve been waiting for, and kudos to them for beating VMWare to the punch!