As soon as I heard about it I had to do it. I even spent cash to do it (for a new copy of XP… don’t buy at CompUSA or even the local university unless you’re a student; I bought mine at PC Club).Anyway, putting XP on my mbp was actually fun and very simple. Of course no sooner had I done it than I heard that there was a way to run XP apps inside of OSX without having to reboot (Parallelz). Hmmmm. Truthfully, in that I don’t generally shut off my mpb, I tend not to reboot into XP. But it was more about having the option to flip into XP than whether I’d be using it every day.

I was sent an article warning that this business of putting XP on macintosh computers was going to kill off the OSX market. I’ve heard from other luminaries such as MacWorld’s Peter Cohen who seem to feel that this choice of OSs is something of a reality check for both camps and that nothing is set in stone. Those who lament the pending doom of Mac OS have been making that noise since Windows 95. And those who are all about the mac Kool-aide should note that it really is a head-to-head competition now to see who can put out the hardware/software that the most people want to buy. It’s actually a much more complicated thing than what some, like John Sheesley, fear that no software developer is going to want to support two OSs and so the day of putting out a Windows version and then an OS X version are over. If it were all about the bottom line than Apple would have died ten years ago, but the Mac Magicians have continued to dance circles around the Redmond behemoth. And hopefully this move to make mac the platform that can run any OS is going to make the Redmond-ites do a little “duty” in their pants and put out a product that isn’t primarily a virus catcher… JBB