Apple Drops Windows 7 Boot Camp Support in New Mac Pro

[dermeister]

I hate Windows 8 and I have a perfectly good Windows 7 license.

I fact I have a perfectly good Mac Pro. Got to hand it to Apple, they've made it so cumbersome for me to get a new Mac Pro that I won't even buy one out of sheer impulse where as I am rather confident I would have soon enough.

 

[mdelvecchio]

I see it more hurting than benefiting. Supporting Windows 7 increases their potential market of people who want to own a Mac but rely on Windows as well. If someone relies on Windows, then Macs NOT having an option (of course there are still VMs) will decrease sales or keep them flat if anything.

im in the camp that replies on windows -- i do enterprise .NET software dev, but i dont use bootcamp at all...i run windows virtualized in VMWare Fusion. in fact i run a crusty old version of XP.

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Virtual Machines, no matter how efficient will always have an overhead. When you are trying to milk every last mhz out of your hardware for absolute performance gain, why dump 5%-10% (estimated) away on running VM instead of on bare metal.

because most users dont need that extra gain? whats your use case? if its legacy windows software, you dont need it. if youre doing windows development (me), you dont need it. gaming? MP isnt marketed as a gaming machine, it's a pro workstation.

 

[Autosaver]

Windows 8 is amazing.

Yeah I know, people hate the Metro interface. I honestly don't mind. I can basically disable most of its features so I rarely ever see it.

Apple most likely wants it for a couple reasons.

1) Windows 8 is the newest version.

2) Windows 8 has VERY good performance, much better than Windows 7. It's snappier, faster, and overall more responsive. It works way better with lower end hardware than Windows 7 and it fully supports SSDs. The speed of Windows 8 alone is worth getting it.

I used Windows 7 for many years. I can't go back after using Windows 8.1. The speed of the operating system and the tweaks makes it stand out.

 

[mdelvecchio]

I rather think the Mac Pro has enough headroom to run Windows in a fashion such that the 5-10% is not missed.

agreed, but then he wouldnt get to say "bare metal".

here in enterprise land, we use VM servers for everything in our datacenters these days.

 

[sseaton1971]

I'd rather cut off my left nut with a rusty soup spoon than use Windows 8...

Really? I would rather use Windows 8.

Oh, the drama!

 

[iBlazed]

I see what you are doing, but no.

What am I doing?

 

[brentsg]

When it comes to running windows on a Mac, virtual machines bring along enough advantages to make any efficiency loss worthwhile for most users.

Gamers can tweak Win8 easily enough to get rid of Metro and be just fine.

 

[LordVic]

I rather think the Mac Pro has enough headroom to run Windows in a fashion such that the 5-10% is not missed.

Its a trade off. depends on the application. its not easy to say that it will be missed or not.

its one of those thinsg that you have to just go through system testing to find out if the overhead is worth losing.

you have to remember that the Mac Pro only really excels performance wise past other workstations when the GPU's are leveraged. Otherwise it's a standard Xeon based workstation. If the overhead is too much for other workstations, it's still going to be too much for the Pro.

i've seen in my work, mixed setups where sometimes the VM is more than powerful enough for application, and i've seen issues where its painful that even that 5-10% loss in performance means the difference in a query taking 10 minutes, or 15

 

[dermeister]

because most users dont need that extra gain? whats your use case? if its legacy windows software, you dont need it. if youre doing windows development (me), you dont need it. gaming? MP isnt marketed as a gaming machine...

Sure but people who want a good gaming machine may prefer to have one monitor setup and one PC to having a dedicated gaming machine when they have an nMP, regardless of what it was marketed as.

Targeting only the latest Windows release for BootCamp is rather much. I know supporting two targets is cumbersome, but they're going to force a bunch of people to upgrade perfectly good software to a controversial upgrade to save a bit of effort. Worse, some won't want to bother, i.e. forget the nMP.

 

[JAT]

What am I doing?

Stirring up feelings against MS. I'm certainly not complaining.

 

[mdelvecchio]

Is that a criteria for posting his displeasure with the situation. Perhaps he was GOING to buy one.

what situation? he doesnt even own one. and if he did, he could virtualize win7.

sorry, but anytime i see MR users complaining about apple being "lazy" and how it "pisses me off", i see an emotionally unstable 14-year-old kid whining about the world not meeting his expectations. these posts are hand-waiving of the most annoying sort.

 

[samcraig]

im in this camp -- i do enterprise .NET software dev, but i dont use bootcamp at all...i run windows virtualized in VMWare Fusion. in fact i run a crusty old version of XP.

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because most users dont need that extra gain? whats your use case? if its legacy windows software, you dont need it. if youre doing windows development (me), you dont need it. gaming? MP isnt marketed as a gaming machine...

There are ways around the current findings.

I think it's silly to justify it though to others who don't feel the same as you (not saying I am one of those). I think it's easy to see why some would prefer bootcamp over VM and why some prefer VM over bootcamp.

"Need" is relative.

 

[chrono1081]

You sure have a flair for the dramatic. Apart from the Start Menu the desktop works exactly the same on Windows 8 as it did on Windows 7. With Windows 8.1 you can even set the OS to immediately go to the desktop and automatically return there when closing apps, rather than Start screen. Combine that with pinning your favourite apps to the Taskbar and you won't really have to use the Start screen all too much.

There shouldn't be any silly back and forth. Multitasking on Windows 8 is not fun.

 

[rdlink]

I don't think Apple understands how Microsoft works. They make ONE good OS every 5 or 6 years.

2000: Windows 2000 (Good)
2000: Windows ME (Mainstream)
2001: Windows XP
2007: Windows Vista (You know you love it)
2009: Windows 7 (Mainstream)
2012: Windows 8

Let's see use Windows 8 or Don't use Windows at All... Is this some type of plan to make us only use OS X?

Little Side note, I had the choice between Windows 7 or 8 for my Mac over the summer. I chose 7.

Wait, just looked. Microsoft is expanding Windows 7 support till 2020, Why is apple so "out with the old"?

Can you please explain which of the three Win2K, WinXP, WinME you considered the "good" one? I hope you were not talking about WinME?

 

[scottwaugh]

....It probably has to do with driver development and the fact that most OEM component manufacturers are starting to target Windows 8 more now...

However, its important to note, the device driver model hasn't changed from Windows 7 to Windows 8 - so this isn't a realistic reason.

The last time it was changed significantly was with Vista (and is why there are alot of old PC's marooned on XP).

 

[mdelvecchio]

What am I doing?

dreaming up conspiracy theories.

 

[FluJunkie]

Seriously, if you really need to run a dedicated version of windows, then just buy a cheap HP with Windows 7. You can use your Mac Pro to login with VNC or Remote Desktop or something. No need to clutter up a Mac Pro with a copy of windows.

And if I want the computational resources of my Mac Pro? Why are you assuming someone who has bought a workstation, and wants to run windows, doesn't want to do workstation tasks in Windows?

I rather think the Mac Pro has enough headroom to run Windows in a fashion such that the 5-10% is not missed.

I tend to run resource-limited jobs - unless I'm being really sloppy with variable creation and I max out my RAM well before anything else, I'm running pretty close to 100% utilization in some cases. I'd miss 5-10%, since I don't bill by the hour.

because most users dont need that extra gain? whats your use case? if its legacy windows software, you dont need it. if youre doing windows development (me), you dont need it. gaming? MP isnt marketed as a gaming machine...

SAS. Some other scientific computing tools that are Windows-only.

agreed, but then he wouldnt get to say "bare metal".

here in enterprise land, we use VM servers for everything these days.

We don't. We have a mix of VM servers for public facing application hosting, and standard (since apparently saying "bare metal" is an invitation for derision in your world) servers for most compute jobs.

My Mac Pro has a bootcamp partition, and Parallels points at that. Best of both worlds, and I'd be miffed to have that go away. Windows 8.1 is tolerable (I've got it on my gaming machine, cheap license was cheap) but it adds nothing above Windows 7.

 

[armalite]

It sucks and Win 8.1 REALLY FREAKING SUCKS I was all set to load Win 7 on the nMP but called for latest one. BS!!!! I really hate Win 8.1 and if I wasn't in to gaming I never would have loaded it.

 

[Cougarcat]

There shouldn't be any silly back and forth.

And there doesn't have to be, if you don't want to. Install a start menu app and boot directly to the desktop, you'll never have to see it.

 

[Chupa Chupa]

Only on the Mac Pro? If so, it might not be a big deal.

Not likely only but rather first. As model refreshes happen betting Win 7 won't be supported either.

 

[iBlazed]

dreaming up conspiracy theories.

Actually I wasn't even remotely serious. But being that this is the internet I guess it's hard to tell.

 

[Nyy8]

Can you please explain which of the three Win2K, WinXP, WinME you considered the "good" one? I hope you were not talking about WinME?

Oh crap! Huge mistake on my part, XP is the good one there. I put mainstream on the wrong one.

 

[LordVic]

There shouldn't be any silly back and forth. Multitasking on Windows 8 is not fun.

care to elaborate? the multitasking capabilities of Win8 should be idnetical to previous versions of Windows.

In Desktop mode in particular, you should see absolutely zero difference in how the computer actually runs

 

[mdelvecchio]

i've seen in my work, mixed setups where sometimes the VM is more than powerful enough for application, and i've seen issues where its painful that even that 5-10% loss in performance means the difference in a query taking 10 minutes, or 15

your client OS wont make any diff on the speed of a query running off a data server somewhere else. so im assuming you're referring to VM servers vs native servers. limiting the conversation to this...in the past five years ive seen all the datacenters for major enterprise corporations move to exclusively VM environments. these VMs run atop blade servers...if there isnt enough power for a given VM (say your slow data server example) we toss in more hardware resources and the problem is solved. i dont see this trend reversing because the ease of management is too valuable over any performance gain from a native stand-alone server.

 

[Sy7ygy]

Care to explain Apple? Seriously people don't drop $3,000+ on computers so you can weed out the features you're too lazy to support. This pisses me off.

This is 2013/2014 hardware. Windows 7 is a 5 year old OS - 7 if you consider it under it's true form of Vista 2.

In Desktop mode in particular, you should see absolutely zero difference in how the computer actually runs

Have you ever used Windows 8?

It's a monstrosity.