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Apple Drops Windows 7 Boot Camp Support in New Mac Pro

dermeister said:
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.
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no, it completely matters -- apple MP strategy isnt designed around gamers w/ more dollars than sense (MP isnt an ideal gaming rig). it's designed around pro users, and gaming isnt a pro use case. so i ask again -- what pro use case dictates a scenario in which A) Windows 7 is required specifically, and B) cant be virtualized? i cant think of it. and i bet apple couldnt either.

Worse, some won't want to bother, i.e. forget the nMP.
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i dont think this is keeping apple management awake at night. i think youre making it out to be more of a tragic mistake than it really is.
 
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Non-story of the year

For all 3 people out there who will buy this exotic mac in order to run windows exclusively: sorry, you have to run the latest version.
 
samcraig said:
I see it more hurting than benefiting.
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Hurting/benefiting whom? Apple or consumers? Do you have enough information to offer an intelligent opinion?

samcraig said:
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.
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Desupport of windows 7 is only applicable (for now) to late 2013 Mac Pros. So yeah, of the 35 who want to buy a new Mac Pro, they no longer have the option to boot into windows 7 though I suppose parallels and vmware would still be an option. But considering only 12 of those people care about windows 7...
 
Wow that's crappy of Apple.

Especially considering that 7 and 8 use the same driver stack. Any driver written for Windows 8 will work for Windows 7, without any modification.

Did I mention this is crappy of Apple?
 
Chupa Chupa said:
Not likely only but rather first. As model refreshes happen betting Win 7 won't be supported either.
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Weird decision. Why would Apple do this? If they want to shaft Microsoft, then remove Bootcamp entirely. But to force folks to upgrade their software license to 8 just so they can play a few video games that Apple has never showed much interest in supporting?!??! This doesn't make any sense. And this force to Windows 8 (a) helps Microsoft sell more 8 licenses, (b) gives Windows 8 more critical mass (a fact that is getting very embarrassing to microsoft) and (c) exposes more users to Metro space which maybe helps sell a few more Windows phones.
 
samcraig said:
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.
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not when it comes to apple's pro strategy. youre asking them to support a scenario (Windows 7, non-virtualized) that doesnt fit a wide use case. that some of you are gamers and simply want it doesnt mean bo-diddly, because thats not the use case the MP is marketed for.
 
Hey Apple you dropped the wrong OS. You should had dropped Windows 8 instead.

One of the worst mistakes I've made in computing lately was downgrading, erm I mean "upgrading," to Windows 8.
 
mdelvecchio said:
you client OS wont make any diff on the speed of a SQL query running off a SQL 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 SQL 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.
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We're a software house that does major banking and financial institution backends.

we have moved to VM's for some things where the overhead doesn't impact. We're not an SQL house. We use Progress software, which runs in a very different manner. its extremely IO intensive and absolutely takes a hit via virtualization. For example, these database system tend to run a lot of system code directly connected to the databases shared memory and can be extremely RAM and CPU intensive.

not the most recent article, but it still unfortunately applies to some hurdles faced with Virtualization and database systems.
http://pugchallenge.org/downloads/354_OE_Sys_Virtualization.pdf
pugchallenge.org/slides/2011Virtualization.pptx
(some techie reading)

it depends on the setup, whether VM is suitable or not. Some of our largest Clients, who are dealing with billions of dollars of transactions a day for example, will notice the overhead of 10% loss. Some of the smaller ones who only do a few dozen transactions a day couple probably run on a pentium with no matter.

this is just an example off the top of my head though why VMs are not always the solution.

What I'm just trying to say is that it's not simple, especially in a Professional environment, that this workstation is aiming ftowards to jsut throw a blanket statement like "just vitualize it". that is NOT always the suitable solution.
 
mdelvecchio said:
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.
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You could probably substitute "unstable 14 year old" with "gamer" and still have the same result. I suspect that they are frequently the same thing though (gamer and unstable 14 year old).
 

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TallManNY said:
Weird decision. Why would Apple do this?
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Yes, odd decision. I don't know why they did it as it seems like its cutting its nose to spite its face. Pros that use/ need Windows of course use 7. 8 is worthless. Another Tim Cook miscue?
 
the-msa said:
yup. its faster and snappier than windows 7. there is literally not a single reason to choose win 7 over win 8.
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I use both Windows 7 and Windows 8.1 in a virtual machine and yes, I prefer Windows 8.1 way over Windows 7. It's not only faster but also safer and more efficient ... oh and it has much better high DPI support. (7 just sucks in that aspect)

However I still don't understand why Apple dropped Windows 7, it's the most widely used operating system at the moment.
 
This is exciting. Now if they just improve boot camp all around, I could see myself returning to a Mac with the next round of updates, 13"rMBP perhaps, with decent support for the best OS around (even if ms is doing its damnedest to mess it up), would be pretty nice.

I still like the Mac hardware style but have had zero time for OS X since Lion forced that terrible version control on us. Windows 8 has the option, but doesn't make it the default, which is as it should be. It is even more enjoyable to use than Vista, which is the OS that started me thinking I had no need for OS X in the first place.

This is a better step forward for Windows than anything MS has done. Apple's tendency to weed out the weak, the outdated, and the why-waste-time-supporting is a necessary "evil".
 
the-msa said:
yup. its faster and snappier than windows 7. there is literally not a single reason to choose win 7 over win 8.
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Support. Corporate and Enterprise is resistant to move to Windows 8, and many software vendors (not really at the consumer level) have not validated, tested nor certified their software for use in Windows 8.

And in the enterprise, you do not run on non certified platforms.
 
Sven11 said:
It's serious, dude. Don't judge an operating system you never used or only used 2 minutes or only by watching screenshots of it.
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I've used it. For more than 2 minutes, and more than watching screenshots of it (I work in enterprise IT). Its interface is convoluted and confusing, even with the upgrade to 8.1. I'd take 7 any day of the week over 8.
 
FluJunkie said:
SAS. Some other scientific computing tools that are Windows-only.

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.
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me, i work in the energy sector w/ time-series databases containing vast amounts of real-time data from an untold number of facility equipment sensors, and while my tools are Window clients, the servers are the bottleneck. every enterprise ive consulted to has switched over to virtualized data centers...dollar per hertz, theyre cheaper and easier to maintain, improve, and support than stand-alone servers. the marketplace has moved past them as a whole. but that's all pretty moot because the MP isnt marketed as a server solution anyhow.

Windows 8.1 is tolerable (I've got it on my gaming machine, cheap license was cheap) but it adds nothing above Windows 7.
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but it not adding much above Windows 7 isnt what drives apple decisions for the MP. there is no job-to-be-done that the MP is marketed for which requires non-virtualized Win7... or should i say not enough of a scenario to justify apple allocating their own resources to it, anyway...
 
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Who even has room for a Boot Camp partition on their SSD anyway? A VMware image is way more compact.
 
MattG said:
I've used it. For more than 2 minutes, and more than watching screenshots of it (I work in enterprise IT). Its interface is convoluted and confusing, even with the upgrade to 8.1. I'd take 7 any day of the week over 8.
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Wow for 3 minutes, maybe even for a few hours, whatever, it's only convoluted and confusing for you because it's different. Install Classic Shell on it and enable boot to desktop and you'll get a better Windows 7 experience.
 
I wonder why do people care to install windows on Mac when you can build a high spec windows with relatively less money than Mac.
 
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