[Scotsman]

Apple has made available BootCamp to allow users to setup their Intel based Mac's to dual boot OSX and XP.

So what does this mean in the grand scheme of things? To listen to all the pundits spouting off already you'de think the earth had fallen off it's axis. Certainly for some the ability to switch between OS's is a blessing. But in the larger picture I don't think it's going to make much difference. When someone buys a Mac, they are purchasing the whole Mac experience, not just a piece of hardware to run Windows. The only thing this humble engineer can see that would change that is if Apple started selling machines with Windows pre-installed. While that could happen, I don't think it's very likely. At least not in the near term.

As to BootCamp itself, yes it does work well, and the Intel Mac's do make for a nice machine to run XP on. However, the need to reboot the machine to switch between OS's makes it very clumsy to actually use if you need to switch between Windows and Mac applications frequently.

[Demetrius]

when i saw that this was available for download from apple, i leered and snorted and in a BIG way too and i thought "steve jobs has finally lost his friggin' mind"... but thinking about this, i can conclude that apple has made a very sound and viable corporate move. for one thing this is a beta which will become a full-fledged "solution" and it will be integrated into the next rev of OS X (leopard). i can only ponder as to how well apple can make it work. seems hard to imagine anything other than just "dual boot" capabilities being as how the two operating systems will be on seperate partitions, which could be a good thing seeing as how windoze has always been plagued with intolerable issues and vulnerabilities and eventhough the likelyhood of those "issues" affecting OS X is slim to none, we wouldn't want that to clutter our OS X side of things, now would we? another thing is apple plans to develop their X-Code to be able to code apps that will run native both in OS X and in windoze... and i know what you're thinking... "this is how IBM lost the battle with their OS 2." but, here's where it differs... since OS 2 could run apps coded for windoze, all the developers just started coding their apps for windoze...but if an app is developed for OS X plus it is able to run native on windoze too, that means the tables should turn in apple's favor. in any case it will be very interesting to see how it all unfolds.
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[Jaece Wolf]

There are a couple of alternatives to boot camp. One of them can be made to run seamlessly on a mac and uses both mac and windows apps at the same time. I have personally done just that with one of the toughest programs there is to run on that kind of a setup... believe it or not, all you need is a little WINE.
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[Bri]

I don’t get it

Why would Apple in 2007 release a dual booter to a legacy Windows?
Or have I been flat wrong in my perception that OSX is a variant of Linux?

I run a tri-boot machine, Vista-Linux-XP
On the subject of dual booters I would like to pass on that with Vista, things have changed.... Microsoft has deep-sixed its old boot.ini bootloader in favor of a new bootloader. The 'udder' item which only causes minor issues, is the new NTFS format that is used by Vista. So be prepared to install Linux after Vista.

Regarding the other posts here on Vista, upgrading an existing Windows XP system appears to be an almost sure way to find trouble.
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[Scotsman]

OS X is a variant of Unix rather than Linux. It runs the Darwin kernel (which is arguably a poorer choice than if it was built on the Linux kernel).

As to boot camp, I haven't played with it myself. It may be just a boot loader not tied to just switching between XP and OSX, or even just Windows for that matter.