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Apple: Official Boot Camp Support for Windows 7 Coming Later This Year

str1f3 said:
Wow, you are spoiled. You expect a small company to consistently update their OS, their computers' hardware, work on a tablet, update the Apple TV, perfect the iPhone OS, and immediately support a competitor's OS when it's not even an emergency to do so? Is it that much of a pain to wait no more than two months for an update to an OS that you will barely use?

If you ever heard the stories about how hard Jobs pushes his workers, you wouldn't say something so naive.
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Oh, please. It's not like this is a product launch that has been sprung on Apple and we are only talking about an update to Vista, which they already support. This is about meeting customer's expectations and support in 2-months time is only expected if you have low expectations. I'm sorry but no support on Day 1 is poor and inexcusable.
 
Kelmon said:
Oh, please. It's not like this is a product launch that has been sprung on Apple and we are only talking about an update to Vista, which they already support. This is about meeting customer's expectations and support in 2-months time is only expected if you have low expectations. I'm sorry but no support on Day 1 is poor and inexcusable.
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It's a sophomoric way for Apple to flip MS a Neo wave and fart in their general direction at the expense of their costomer's inconvenience. Nothing new here. Is Apple worried that their captive audience can do anything about it ? Like leave ? Yeah, that's going to happen. :D
 
hiimamac said:
Speaking if msft, with no advertising according to the news, they just showed the first ever msft store grand opening today. Ummmmm, as a 90-99% mac user and without MS Courier.

The store was packed. Standing room only and had like 700 people the night before trying to get in. Wow.
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First ever? Yeah, even I would go to that, just out of curiousity, and to say "I was there."
 
funkyp56 said:
I think they are dropping support due to lack of true 64-bit on those models. meaning they have the cpus for it but not the logic boards needed. thats why you cant hit 4gb of RAM.

However. I am running Windows 7 32 on two of the Late 2006 models, drivers off the SL Disk worked fine, system runs great.
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The 2006 Mac Pro is on that list, and you can put 32GB of RAM in it. So that's not the reason.
 
Jason Beck said:
What are your thoughts on it? I am probably going to install it on my MB just to mess around with for a little while. To check it out.
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Honestly, it's not they huge upgrade that some people make it out to be. It's like vista with a different taskbar (now works like Apple's dock, only not as well) and it seems to be more stable for gaming than Vista. Thats really all I use it for, so I can't comment on other improvements.
 
Fuchal said:
Apple should have had this today, on day one.
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darwinian said:
So ... why are they not being supported officially?
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The reasoning may be a bit of a political/business decision. Apple doesn't benefit directly from Windows 7 sales (other than dissatisfied Window 7 customers). If support was available today, that may spur some impulse Windows 7 purchases. If they wait out support, they may stem some of those impulsive purchases. That seems to explain why it WILL be supported eventually, just not soon enough to help early adoption.

On the flip-side, you could argue that support of Windows 7 on a Mac available today could spur some impulse purchases of Mac hardware. I would guess that those in the market for Window 7 today on a new machine are looking for cheap hardware, though.
 
Windows 7 and Parallels 4

Just FYI, I am running Windows 7 RC in Parallels 4 on a MacPro 3,1. No hiccups or problems at all. I have been meaning to give it a try on my two + year old MacBook with Bootcamp. I'll try it tonight and post if there are any snags.
 
"Support" is such a trivial matter. I'm running Win7 on my MBP without any trouble, even though it's not officially supported yet. I have no doubt that the "unsupported" machines will run Win7 just fine; but if you bitch to Apple when it potentially doesn't work right, they reserve the right to give you the cold shoulder instead of helping you out.
 
AidenShaw said:
Or they're embarrassed that Windows 7 x64 runs on those systems, but OSX 10.6 x64 kernel won't.
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That's not it. The earliest MacBook Pro, MacBook, Mac Mini, and iMacs all use Intel's Core Duo, which isn't 64-bit at all. Those models won't run the x64 kernel of *ANY* OS. Yet the MacBook and Mac Mini are *NOT* on the list. Neither is the "Mid 2006" iMac.

Plus, the first Mac Pro *IS* on the unsupported list, even though it *HAS* 64-bit CPUs. (As are the "Late 2006" iMac and MacBook Pro, which both have 64-bit Core 2 Duo CPUs.)

What it looks like to me is that it is graphic driver related. All of the 'excluded' systems have Radeon X1000-series or (in the case of the Mac Pro,) GeForce 7000-series graphics. Same-generation systems that *ARE* supported have Intel GMA950 graphics.

A quick check of Intel, AMD/ATI, and nVidia's websites show that Intel has Windows 7 drivers for GMA950, but AMD does *NOT* have Windows 7 drivers for X1000-series GPUs. (The X1000-series and older are now "Legacy" to AMD. They say you can use Vista drivers as a workaround.) nVidia has Windows 7 drivers for the GeForce 7000-series; but Apple is probably just blanket ruling out the Mac Pro, "just in case" it has a Radeon installed.
 
I wonder about 2 things: deliver Mac OS X install DVDs with 10.6.x rather than 10.6.0 on it like they did with previous versions of the Mac OS. And if so, wether they'll put newer versions of the Boot Camp drivers on them. I don't want to have to do an incremental update thing (like installing version X.0, then X.1, then X.2… X.9) when I need to reinstall the software. I want to be able to install the latest version, or at least go from version x.0 to x.9 in one update rather than 9 separate ones.

On a side note, while I have the Golden Master version of Mac OS X, I think I may want to buy the full retail version when the updated disks come out as well as iLife '10. I don't really want to get the $29 version because I'll have to install Leopard first, then Snow Leopard (annoying as heck). Plus, I use iLife a bit so I might as well bundle the 2 together.
 
I wonder if the older Mac Pro would be supported if you've upgraded to a newer graphics card (in my case, the 8800GT). My hope is that I'll at least be able to install the new boot camp tools, even if they don't come with tech support.
 
Fuchal said:
Lazy. Apple should have had this today, on day one.
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That's kind of a "lazy" comment. :)

Seriously, for something as critical as Windows7 on bootcamp, a full iteration of regression and stress testing on the absolute final shipping product is needed. That takes weeks, and is expensive. The Apple schedule allows for that as well as time for a mini-update if problems need to be fixed. It really isn't possible to expedite this, at least without going through enormous expense.

Note that Apple had Day 1 support for iTunes on W7. That was a lot more critical then BootCamp, and Apple pulled out all the stops to achieve this.
 
Not like they'll actually support it with the new Bootcamp coming later...

They never have, and probably never will. They've known of an issue that freezes the computer while running Windows Vista or Windows 7 for a year now while using any MacBook pro with the 9600M GT. What have they done about it? Nothing.

Bad:apple:
 
we're talking about the Merom systems, not Yonah

ehurtley said:
That's not it. The earliest MacBook Pro, MacBook, Mac Mini, and iMacs all use Intel's Core Duo, which isn't 64-bit at all.
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We were talking about the Merom systems with 32-bit chipsets - note the OP said "I think they are dropping support due to lack of true 64-bit on those models. meaning they have the cpus for it but not the logic boards needed. thats why you cant hit 4gb of RAM".
 
UltraNurd said:
I wonder if the older Mac Pro would be supported if you've upgraded to a newer graphics card (in my case, the 8800GT). My hope is that I'll at least be able to install the new boot camp tools, even if they don't come with tech support.
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See my post and several others above. It works fine.
 
Gasu E. said:
Seriously, for something as critical as Windows7 on bootcamp, a full iteration of regression and stress testing on the absolute final shipping product is needed. That takes weeks, and is expensive.
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Windows 7 was built on 13 July, and was available to vendors the following week.

Apple's had 11 weeks to test a few drivers, most of which will be unchanged from Vista.

This is petty, and makes Apple look bad.


Eidorian said:
It already is and iTunes 9 adds additional Super Bar support as well.
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Doesn't say that here: http://www.apple.com/itunes/download/
 
complete bull... Windows 7 runs great on my late 2006 macbook pro..installed no problem... only thing odd is my apple wireless keyboard disconnects frequently when not typing... but I can live with it... I have been to lazy to search for a solution
 
Weird. I wonder what needs to be updated –*Windows 7 x64 Ultimate with Snow Leopard's Boot Camp v3.0 drivers seems to be working just fine for me so far. Not a hiccup so far, with drivers or Windows 7 proper –*its actually pretty impressive for an OS, certainly better than XP and much much better than Vista (funny how that works).
 
atari1356 said:
It may have something to do with the way Microsoft makes the Windows 7 install disks.

When they had the beta version and RC version, the DVD's wouldn't even boot on my 15" MacBook Pro (late 2006). It was problem related to EFI/booting.

I don't recall exactly what the specific solution was... but in order to get the 64 bit Windows 7 (RC) install disc to boot on my computer I had to burn a new copy of the Windows 7 CD/DVD using Nero burning software (with some settings that I don't remember).

The point being, the DVD that Microsoft ships probably won't even boot on those Macs listed as unsupported.
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I had the same or a similar problem installing XP on my Blackbook. The installation blue-screened with "SESSION3_INSTALLATION_FAILURE". Turns out it was a fairly well-known problem and the solution was to make a copy of the install DVD.
 
str1f3 said:
Wow, you are spoiled. You expect a small company to consistently update their OS, their computers' hardware, work on a tablet, update the Apple TV, perfect the iPhone OS, and immediately support a competitor's OS when it's not even an emergency to do so? Is it that much of a pain to wait no more than two months for an update to an OS that you will barely use?

If you ever heard the stories about how hard Jobs pushes his workers, you wouldn't say something so naive.
Click to expand...

[my emphasis]

Small company? What planet do you live on? Apple (AAPL) just passed Google (GOOG) in terms of market capitalization. It's 6 times the market cap of DELL. Microsoft is one of the few companies worth more. Get real. Apple is a huge multinational company. They could easily have provided drivers for their (limited) range of computers for Windows 7 by today if they wanted to.

It's almost amusing how many on this forum who believe Apple Inc. is a small underdog.
 
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