While I love my PowerBook and am a shameless Apple fan-boy, Apple is, without a doubt, one of the most clueless companies out there when it comes to embracing the grass-roots developers. Sure, they have winning over hipsters down pat. But when it comes to winning over their new market base -- code-monkeys -- their record is somewhat spotty.
Not being lucky enough to have a MacBookPro -- I'm still on my beloved 12" PowerBook -- I haven't tried it out myself. However, I've talked extensively with several people who have, including one of "my" most recent Apple-converts, who bought a copy of Parallels within hours of me IM'ing him about it.
In summary, Parallels works, and it works well. Sure, there aren't drivers/adaptors for game-level video card whiz-doodles, but BootCamp needs some reason to exist, I guess.
Virtualization matters for the code-monkey crowd in a big way. I think it was Dick Wall on a recent Java Posse who I last heard articulating how great the tool of virtualization is in coding. In summary, being able to run multiple "machines" on one systems is a huge breakthrough in programming: spinning up a machine on demand is priceless, having multiple OS's to test our your app is worth it's weight in gold, and being able to have a virtual computer lab in your lap is speeds up software development.
So, in Parallels we have a working virtualization platform for Intel based OS X. At the same time, we have this nearly slam-dunked opportunity for Apple to capture the top 20-30% of the developer population.
The question is: will Apple h0rk it up?
Getting Konfabulated
Apple is notorious for screwing up it's ecosystem in favor of trying to own and control the whole market. The most recent example that comes to mind is Konfabulator. Here was Konfabulator, a popular (if not the first, right?) widget platform that worked on Windows and OS X. Seeing a good idea, instead of embracing Konfabulator, Apple just clone-and-owned it with Dashboard.
Don't get me wrong, Dashboard is great, I use it all the time. But, it's quite rude to make a move like that and it certainly doesn't win good will with the finicky developer market. Not to mention that it forks the dashboarding world, which is annoying as piss to a user.
The Pit of Bad-will
It just takes a few rude and/or bonehead moves like that to get people to start writing "ThinkPad4Life" in every slashdot post about Apple. So, dear readers, keep your peepers open for what Apple does in the virtualization space. Will they embrace and encourage Parallels, or will they Konfabulate it?
Either way, I'm such a mindless fan-boy that I'll still keep telling everyone to get their butts on the Apple train. But my job will be a little harder when I have to admit that you have to watch out for the roaving rude-boys.
(My snark-fest against BootCamp isn't against it technically: I'm sure it's great and that the folks who worked on it did quality work. It's against the product marketing idea that providing a dual-boot app for OS X would be even close to enough of a solution for the problem at hand.)
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