Hold, I say hold the presses!
This just in from Apple: Intel Mac users will be able to dual-boot to XP!
Yes, boys and girls, if you own a new Intel Mac, as well as a full-install CD of Windows XP with Service Pack 2 included, you will be able to boot into either XP or OS X, as desired.
Who else is as excited about this as I am? We all get used to certain habits, not to mention software applications, so changing to a new operating system and/or platform can be daunting. It's always nice to have the ability to dual-boot so you can "switch back" real quick to your favorite apps, especially if you haven't found something to your taste (or your budget) on the new platform.
While many of my own favorites such as Mozilla/Firefox are already platform-indpendant, others such as Microsoft Office are not financially trivial to replace. OpenOffice -for example- is an excellent product, but it still isn't 100% Office compatible, and that's what I need for many of the documents I've created or modified.
With Boot Camp, as a new Intel Apple user I could reboot into XP in order to maintain those documents, then boot back into OS X for regular work, until I could obtain alternative software such as Office for the Mac, which can be found for not too much on eBay.
Another prospective group would be XP-based gamers, who can't find their favorite titles on Macs. This would parallel the DOS gamers ten years ago who insisted on retaining a dual-boot setup (MS-DOS and Windows) so they could still play their favorite games.
This is a good thing...
Caveats:
-If you want to read/write to the XP partition from OS X, it must be FAT, not NTFS. The latter is read-only under OS X.
-You must have retained the original single partition for the entire drive on your Mac.
-You must have a copy of XP with Service Pack included; folks (such as myself) who own an earlier install CD without SP2 included need not apply.
-The Apple remote control, USB modem, and Bluetooth devices won't work.
-Apple does not support Boot Camp. Use at your own risk.
Still, all in all, I'm pretty fracking excited about this. Considering that most people will have to drop a cool grand anyway to enjoy all the "enhancements" of Windows Vista, why not spend that money on a more-secure system?