Without trying to initiate a holy war for those involved in font production a dual boot Mac might well be the way to go - easy switching to FLab for Windows, or VOLT, or even proofing under Avalon, would equal better cross-platform fonts.

Simon, that was exactly the very first thought I had. Can't wait to try it out :^) But first I'll need to get one of those MacBook Pro

I think the first customer for this will be Luc deGroot who is famous for the Apple logo sticker he has on his Windows laptop.

Cheers, Si

Ya got me Si, now I will have to take the BMW emblem off of my '79 Gremlin :-)

ChrisL

wasn't the whole point of Switching™ to get away from all things Windows?

but now they have an open door policy :-)

ChrisL

You know, this could be a brilliant switch tactic.

Yep. Steve Jobs: "Our machines run (almost) anything!"

The most interesting analysis I've seen on this is John Gruber's:

http://daringfireball.net/2006/04/windows_the_new_classic

There are many specs written by IT groups in corporations, schools, and government, which require a desktop computer to boot in Windows to be approved for purchase. This little diddy just skipped around that catch 22 and opens the choices. That is not to say that hordes will jump at the chance, it just says there is a choice. This is more a point for the UNIX research crowd than for the smaller design publishing market which Apple already has.

ChrisL

The other thing this does, of course, is to enable Mac users to take advantage of the serious and considerable lead that the Windows versions of Office software have over the Mac versions, especially in terms of internationalisation and complex script support.

I'll be interested to see what impact this has on companies that produce software for both Windows and Mac (including Microsoft). It may convince some to scale back their Mac-specific development. Why, after all, would you invest in two development teams when the product of one will work on both platforms? And then there are all those companies that have a niche market developing applications for the Mac, who will suddenly have competition from often larger and better funded companies making similar Windows software. I suspect the impact will depend on how seamlessly Bootcamp allows Windows apps to run within a general Mac environment. If developers for Windows apps start shipping them with Mac-like skin options, the competition will be even stiffer. It could be the death knell for a lot of Mac-specific software development.

Something else has just occurred to me: Web Developers must be as thrilled as we Font Developers are!!

I just hope that someone from Microsoft's marketing department is paying attention (that is, if customer loyalty means anything to them). The specs on Apple's website state that the Windows XP OS you install must be a full-install disk and not an upgrade. Under this arrangement, one might presume that current windows users who want to take advantage of this opportunity would have to purchase a new license, whether or not they were eligible for an upgrade. Perhaps they should consider a special upgrade package that works like a new install to the Mac OS.

I really hope that Apple opts for a virtualisation* solution in Leopard.

* Running Windows XP natively in a window on Mac OS X, eliminating the irritating need to re-boot. Parallels has released a free beta of software that can do this, if you've got an intel mac, try it here.