monkinetic weblog

Jim Roepcke took me to task for my previous comment about dual-booting an Intel-based Mac with Windows. I said:

Would make my life easier as a developer.

Jim responded:

Easier? How? Easier as in, don’t need to port your app to Mac OS X now?

Dual-boot is a dual-edged sword. The Mac could effectively be dead for gaming. Why would anyone spend the money to port a game to the Mac now when you can just say “install Windows”. Anyone who’s spent enough money on a Mac good enough to run new games on is probably not going to flinch at spending the money to install Windows to play games.

Ditto for plenty of other Windows apps.

Jim makes a good point, though in my case I was referring to the fact that it would be convenient for testing web apps on Windows. However, on an Intel-based Mac, a product like VMWare would run Windows with near-native performance, so dual booting becomes a non-starter.

I do wonder sometimes what second- and third-order consequences this “switch” of Apple’s will have…