As I predicted a couple of weeks ago, Apple has officially announced that the company's new Intel-based Macintosh computers can run Windows. I thought it might take as long as a year for Apple to get around to offering this, but Apple often manages to surprise everyone.
The new Intel Macs are extremely fast, and are performing very well against existing Windows machines. Few current Mac users are likely to spend much time running Windows, but a lot of Windows users may be more willing to buy Apple hardware knowing they have an easy transition. Apple has more up its sleeve, though. It has already announced the next version of OS X will be able to run Windows and OS X concurrently (the current Boot Camp software requires a compute restart to switch between the two operating systems). There is further speculation that OS X 10.5 will not only run Windows and OS X side by side, but will also support Linux at the same time. Apple would be the only hardware manufacturer that would give customers the option to run whatever operating environment they choose, making everything much more interesting. Dell and HP are gnashing their teeth right now. Bill Gates probably is not sure what to do...in the short run, Microsoft will sell more copies of Windows. In the long term, many Windows users will be tempted to switch to OS X. Either way, Apple wins.