Apple Logic Pro /LogicExpress Discussion

NY Times :

Windows or Mac? Apple Says Both

By JOHN MARKOFF
Published: April 6, 2006

SAN FRANCISCO, April 5 ? After long imploring computer users to "think 
different" and defining the Macintosh as a lone bulwark against the 
Windows onslaught, Apple Computer has decided to open the gate, at 
least a bit.

Two decades after the first Mac arrived, Apple said Wednesday that it 
would offer users of its latest models a simple way to run the 
Microsoft Windows operating system as well as its own.

That means a single Apple computer will run programs written for either 
the Mac or Windows, though it will have to shut down one system to 
start the other.

The move was greeted with exuberance even among the loyal cult of 
Macintosh enthusiasts who sustained Apple through many bleak years 
before its resurgence on the strength of its iPod music player. Its 
sleek machines have long been objects of consumer lust but are 
frequently passed over in favor of more pedestrian computers that run 
Windows, leaving Apple with about 5 percent of the personal computer 
market.

Wall Street analysts and computer industry experts also greeted the 
move as an obvious and potentially lucrative one for Apple, whose stock 
jumped almost 10 percent, ending the trading day at $67.21, up $6.04.

"The religion has changed," said Charles Wolf, a financial analyst at 
Needham & Company, a New York investment firm. "Apple is saying we have 
the chance to really build the Macintosh platform, and although there 
are risks, we're going to do it."

Indeed, although much is still made of the rivalry between Apple and 
Microsoft, and Steven P. Jobs, Apple's co-founder and chief executive, 
has continued to poke fun at Microsoft's struggles to modernize 
Windows, Apple has steadily moved to accommodate itself to the rest of 
the computing world.

Shortly after he returned to Apple in 1997, Mr. Jobs persuaded 
Microsoft to commit to make its Office software run on his computers 
and invest in his company. More recently, in 2003, he developed a 
version of his popular iTunes software that runs on Windows-based 
computers, giving him an opening to sell his wildly popular iPods to 
tens of millions of PC users.

Last year Mr. Jobs stunned the computer world by announcing that he 
would break away from his alliance with I.B.M. and recreate the 
Macintosh based on Intel microprocessors. It was the switch to Intel 
chips, long the standard in the Windows world, that opened the door to 
Mac-Windows harmony.

Through all of these moves, Mr. Jobs has managed to maintain his loyal 
base of customers. In fact the Macintosh religion can still be palpably 
felt among those who have remained loyal to the user-friendly computer 
even as its market share dipped below 3 percent.

"I love the Mac platform, I just hope I won't have to boot Windows even 
for Photoshop in a few years," Alexandros Roussos, a student at the 
University of Paris who is founder and editor of the MacCulture 
network, a group of Web sites for Macintosh enthusiasts.

Wednesday's move also won an important endorsement from Apple's other 
co-founder, Stephen G. Wozniak, who long ago left the company but 
remains a vocal Macintosh user and is idolized by the Mac faithful.

"It's a great thing for Apple," he told a reporter by e-mail. "I don't 
see the earth being rocked, but I can now recommend Apple hardware to a 
lot more people. One pitch is that if Windows gets too frustrating and 
unbearable and unsafe, then they can easily switch."

And Microsoft took the opportunity to salute the move, and itself. 
"Windows is a great operating system," a Microsoft statement said. 
"We're pleased that Apple customers are excited about running it, and 
that Apple is responding to meet the demand."

But even as it introduced the new capability, in the form of a free 
program called Boot Camp available for download, Apple tried with 
not-so-subtle body language to play down its significance.

Ever the showman, Mr. Jobs had been accused of excess in a recent 
product introduction, when he called reporters to Apple's headquarters 
on short notice for a presentation that included a leather glove to 
protect the finish of an iPod music player. But he was nowhere in 
evidence for Wednesday's announcement, which was made in a simple news 
release.

"Obviously ever since the Macintosh was moved to Intel, we've been 
getting this question from customers," said Philip W. Schiller, Apple's 
senior vice president for worldwide product marketing, explaining the 
Windows decision. "We always said it's possible."

Its muted announcement notwithstanding, Apple did a significant amount 
of technical work to make Windows run cleanly on a Macintosh computer. 
Part of the challenge was writing software modules called device 
drivers that connect the Microsoft software to the Macintosh hardware 
components like disk drives and video displays.

The Boot Camp system makes it possible for an Intel-based Macintosh to 
start up running either Windows XP or the Mac operating system, OS X. 
But one system must be stopped before the other can be started. 
Moreover, the user must also purchase a copy of the Windows operating 
system, at $199 or more.

Apple said Wednesday that it planned to make the Boot Camp capability a 
standard feature of the next version of OS X, which is expected to be 
introduced later this year or in early 2007.

Entering the mainstream of the computing world might undermine one of 
Apple's greatest selling points recently: that the Macintosh has been 
largely immune to computer viruses and other malicious software.

But because the Macintosh programs are shut down when Windows is 
running, and the Windows XP operating system does not know how to read 
and write information to the Macintosh file system, Mr. Schiller 
minimized the risk that Macintosh users might be taking in adding Boot 
Camp.

To be sure, this is not the first time that a Macintosh has been able 
to run Windows software. At one time Macs could be outfitted with 
special cards that ran Intel processors, and more recently several 
companies have produced software emulators that permitted Windows and 
Macintosh programs to coexist. But those were improvised solutions, 
with sluggish results.

Several companies, including VMware, a subsidiary of the data storage 
company EMC, are working on a technology that slips a thin layer of 
instructions underneath the existing Macintosh operating system. Such 
an approach would conceivably allow the Macintosh to run Macintosh, 
Windows and Linux programs simultaneously at full speed.

A number of analysts and software developers said Apple's greatest risk 
was that by opening its machines to Windows software it might 
inadvertently chill the enthusiasm of software developers for producing 
programs to run with the Mac operating system.

The potential downside was far outweighed by the opportunity to expand 
the number of Macintosh users, Mr. Schiller said, which is a central 
factor in attracting software developers.

"We thought long and hard about this," he said. "At the end of the day, 
the most important factor is Mac market share."

Mr. Wolf, the Needham & Company analyst, said that he had done several 
user surveys since Apple's shift to Intel to measure the potential 
sales increase from a Windows-compatible Mac, and that user enthusiasm 
had come back so strong that he had distrusted his results.

He said the biggest and most immediate increase would come in home and 
education markets in the United States; Apple has 14.8 percent of the 
elementary and secondary education market, and 5.1 percent of the home 
market, according to the market research firm IDC.

"It will double Apple's share in these markets," he said.

But in the ranks of Mac veterans on Wednesday, some remained leery of 
crossing the threshold.

"I had the Windows disk halfway into my MacBook Pro," said Jason D. 
O'Grady, the editor of Powerpage.org, a Macintosh enthusiast site. Then 
he recalled the reports he had heard about the risks of exposing 
unprotected Windows-based computers to the Internet and how quickly 
they could become infected.

"I thought to myself, 'Do I have an entire afternoon to waste?' " he 
said.