Moreover, Apple supports Boot Camp users by including Windows drivers for the hardware built-into its Intel Macs.

First, unlike most PCs, the Intel Macs do not use old-style BIOS at startup they use a newer EFI ( Extensible Firmware Interface) that isn’t supported by earlier versions of Windows or by many other PC operating systems. I can think of a couple of reasons for the limitations. (And note that upgrade versions of these are not supported, at least not easily.) The major limitation, at least for me, is that Boot Camp lets users install any PC operating system they want, as long as it’s Windows XP (SP2 or later) or Vista. In typical Apple fashion, Boot Camp “just works”, smoothly and easily – at least if you’re prepared to accept the limitations hard-wired into it by Apple. (See, for instance, my June 2006 column, Windows XP on Macintel a Reality.)Īpple forestalled all this by releasing Boot Camp – first as a beta that ran on then-current Mac OS X 10.4 and later as a Leopard-only official release. The ways they came up with worked – but as with so-called Hackintoshes (non-Apple PCs running Mac OS X), it wasn’t pretty, and it wasn’t something that most users wanted to try on their own. When Apple’s Macintosh computers migrated from using PowerPC CPUs to using Intel chips, the hacker community took it as a challenge to find to a way to run standard PC operating systems – primarily Windows and Linux – on the new Macs.

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