I have a confession to make. I don’t dual boot. I don’t use Windows on my Mac. I don’t need to. There’s not a single bit of software I need that is Windows-only. And even though I have Office:Mac 2008, I open Word and Excel documents in Pages and Numbers. (I don’t hate Office, I just find iWork to be a more rewarding experience!)

But, apparently, I’m in a minority, and every other Mac owner on Earth is simply aching to run Windows 7 on their Apple hardware. Well, you’d be forgiven for thinking as much, given the articles doing the rounds on tech sites this past weekend, most of them tersely reporting how Apple has missed its own deadline for providing official Boot Camp driver support for Microsoft’s latest version of Windows.

Here’s what Apple had to say in a (very short) support note published in October last year:

Apple will support Microsoft Windows 7 (Home Premium, Professional, and Ultimate) with Boot Camp in Mac OS X Snow Leopard before the end of the year. This support will require a software update to Boot Camp.

The rest of the note was just a list of the nine older models of iMac and MacBook that wouldn’t support the Boot Camp update.

AppleInsider reached out to Apple for comment last week, as 2009 drew to a close. An Apple employee responsible for dealing with Bootcamp enquiries told them:

…it was very unlikely that the update would surface in the next 24 hours, adding that a release sometime early next year would be a safer bet.

MacWorld UK writes a little more dramatically about the missed deadline:

On the same day in October that rival Microsoft launched Windows 7 , Apple promised that it would revise Boot Camp… Apple has still not released a Boot Camp revision to its Software Update service.

Although Microsoft officially unveiled Windows 7 in late October, the company first provided developers with early builds a year before that, and began offering previews to the general public in February 2009.

Apple did not elaborate on why they would not support Microsoft’s newest operating system.

I’m not sure a missed deadline is the same as Apple demonstrating they unequivocally ‘would not’ support Windows 7, but the drama doesn’t end there. Here’s Paul Thurrott’s take, from a blog post entitled “Shame on Apple for not Providing Windows 7 Drivers by Now”:

Previously, Apple promised to provide Windows 7 drivers through its Boot Camp utility […] by the end of 2009. So they’re late. But these drivers can and should have been delivered to customers when Windows 7 shipped, in October. I guess the company was too busy fixing a widely-reported user data deletion issue in Snow Leopard to bother supporting a competing system that just works.

So thanks for nothing Apple. We know you’re scared of Windows 7, but come on.

I might offer a less florid possibility; could it possibly be just a delay? Y’know, like Microsoft experienced when it delayed the release of Windows 95. And Windows 98. And Windows… oh, you get the point. Look, software delays happen and they don’t have to mean anything!

Thurrott’s Apple-fan-baiting aside, I have a serious question; am I so completely out of touch that I’m the only Mac user in the world who doesn’t dual boot? OK, I played with some virtualization tools a while back out of sheer curiosity, and the half-hearted belief that I really might need Microsoft Office (note: I didn’t) but it wasn’t long before they were removed.

A Tad Silly

Mac OS X, iLife and iWork have most my bases covered for personal creativity and productivity. And while I do a lot of online collaboration with a wide circle of colleagues and friends, most of whom are on Windows machines, I’m not exaggerating when I say — it’s simply not an issue. Honestly, there isn’t a single thing I’ve come across in 18 months that absolutely demanded I use Windows.

But apparently, that’s unusual, and most Mac owners in the world not only use Windows, they need Windows and, more than any other version, they absolutely must have Windows 7, so Apple’s missed deadline is nothing short of scandalous.

True? Because if that’s not true, all of that breathless reporting over the weekend about missed deadlines and Apple’s ‘fears’ would prove a tad silly, wouldn’t it?

Actually, I have had one issue since switching to the Mac; my friends don’t use iChat. They’re stuck with Skype or — horror of horrors –Windows Live Messenger for video conferencing and collaboration. I pity them. It’s the one thing I wish Apple would release for Windows. The world would be a better place then, I’m sure.

So, tell me, Mac Majority, is Boot Camp’s (temporarily) absent Windows 7 support really the Big Deal the tech press have made it out to be? Am I truly in some peculiar Mac Minority who don’t install Windows on their Apple hardware? Am I, in fact, missing a far bigger point? Please enlighten me.

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It seems Microsoft’s middle management can’t decide whether or not it ripped-off Mac OS X when it was redesigning its flagship product. This is the result of a bewildering comment from Microsoft Partner Group Manager Simon Aldous in an interview this week with PCR. He’s neither a developer nor a designer, and he didn’t work on Windows 7. But Aldous didn’t let that stop him saying this about Microsoft’s latest OS:

One of the things that people say an awful lot about the Apple Mac is that the OS is fantastic, that it’s very graphical and easy to use. What we’ve tried to do with Windows 7 […] is create a Mac look and feel in terms of graphics.

So. Aldous just made it clear; Windows 7 copies borrows its design from the Mac. Only, no, it doesn’t. Not according to a retort yesterday from Windows Communications Manager, Brandon LeBlanc. Writing on The Windows Blog, LeBlanc said:

An inaccurate quote has been floating around the Internet today about the design origins of Windows 7 and whether its look and feel was “borrowed” from Mac OS X. Unfortunately this came from a Microsoft employee who was not involved in any aspect of designing Windows 7. I hate to say this about one of our own, but his comments were inaccurate and uninformed.

The tech press is going bonkers about it, of course, but let’s be honest — when it comes to operating systems, the days when these two giants outright-copied one another and it mattered are far behind us. The common elements of an OS user interface are driven largely by user need/behavior. High resolution color displays and the ubiquity of the mouse and keyboard combo would have led to these similarities irrespective of the company behind them. Put simply, thirty-odd years of OS evolution would result inevitably in functional and aesthetic similarities.

What Are They Looking At?

When people say that Windows 7 “looks like” Mac OS X, I don’t understand exactly what it is they’re looking at.

Mac OS X’s Dock and Windows 7′s Taskbar are similar in function, but not design. The desktop and windows are, again, similar in function — but they don’t look the same.

Windows 7 has gone overboard with transparencies everywhere, to the detriment of ease of use. Mac OS X, on the other hand, introduced transparencies many years ago and has consistently dialled them down in successive OS updates.

Windows was long-criticized for its drab, gunship grey interface. XP and Vista moved gradually away from grey, and now Windows 7’s UI is an explosion of green and blue (or red or pink or purple or whatever godawful theme you choose). Mac OS X, on the other hand, remains a stately, elegant… gunship grey. Not at all like Windows 7. I suspect people mistake Microsoft’s bold-yet-vomit-enducingly-colorful design of Windows 7 with the elegance of Mac OS X.

I’m aware that these observations are subjective. My opinions are just that — my opinions. You might agree with me that it’s wrong to say Windows 7 and Mac OS X look “the same.” You might think I’m desperately uninformed and waste no time telling me as much. (In fact, the predictable result of any article comparing Windows with Mac OS X is the vitriol from commenters apparently unaware they’re reading TheAppleBlog.)

In any case, consider this; here we have two Microsoft execs, one in product sales, one in product design & development. The former sees how customers perceive the Mac to be a superior product, and tries to exploit that perception by ‘connecting’ Windows 7 to it. (“The Mac is great, so by copying it, Windows is great, too.” etc.) The latter has spent years working hard on this new OS and responds with understandable indignation to the suggestion his team copied anything from the competition.

Either way, it’s embarrassing. At a time when they ought to be extolling the wonders and miracles an upgrade to Windows 7 may bring, they’re instead drawing attention to their biggest rival.

I can’t help but imagine an email winging its way through Apple’s Marketing department this week, its subject line reading, “With competition like this, who needs an ad campaign?”

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That’s according to preliminary data released Sunday from a report by Net Applications which breaks down the Internet presence of Mac, Windows and Linux machines for the month of October. Microsoft’s hope that Windows 7 would slow the sure and steady pace of Apple’s growth appears to have been unfounded, at least at this early stage.

Windows still controls the lion’s share of the computer market, of course, with a huge 92.54 percent total share. But that’s down 0.25 percent from September. And yes,  Windows 7 did gain ground during the month, despite being officially available for purchase for only nine days at the end of October, but Net Applications explains that it held more than 2 percent going into the survey, owing to the use of pre-release versions like the beta and the release candidate.

Net Applications also points out, in a separate report, that much of Windows 7′s gain during October (it ended the month at 2.85 percent) came from XP’s market share, so it doesn’t represent the sort of “switch back” users Microsoft was looking for, only upgraders who skipped Vista in favor of the older, more stable OS.

Mac’s share jumped to 5.26 percent, up from 5.12 percent during the previous period. That’s a gain of 2.73 percent overall, which is a good number, but not nearly as high as the 5 percent gain Apple experienced in September. The slowdown might be due to a surge thanks to early adoption of Snow Leopard which is now coming to an end.

Note that Net Applications isn’t taking this data from sales numbers, but from visits to its client web sites, which add up to an impressive 160 million total. That’s a fairly large sample base. Apple 2.0 does point out that this particular methodology tends to favor devices like the iPhone, which account for more frequent web visits due to their ease of use.

The key to the future success of both companies will be converting the large Windows XP user base, which still accounts for 70 percent of all users. Both Apple and Microsoft will be looking to convert those users as they inevitably decide to upgrade. Holiday season numbers over the next few months should give a good indication of who will win out in the competition for those consumer dollars.

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Not to be outdone, Apple is busy breaking records too. At the Web 2.0 Summit this week, Morgan Stanley’s Managing Director Mary Meeker revealed that the iPhone/iPod touch is the fastest growing consumer electronics platform in history. And she had some charts to prove it. TechCrunch’s Erick Schonfeld picked through her 60+ page presentation to focus on three iPhone-relevant slides.

Catchy title, no? But impressive. The iPhone/iPod touch has seen far steeper user adoption than that of other popular consumer electronics platforms, including other iPods.

However, Gizmodo’s Dan Nosowitz very wisely points out:

Comparing one gadget to another in a different category is messy and inconclusive. iPhone adoption is different than, say, Wii adoption for lots of reasons: The iPhone is a phone, a gadget which pretty much everybody has and needs, and it combined the capabilities of a phone with that of an established hit, the iPod. In contrast, the Wii is a videogame system, a category with a totally different demographic, requiring different kinds of software and accessories. They’re just not the same (and I only mentioned a couple reasons), and comparing unit shipments doesn’t necessarily prove anything.

A slightly busier one, this illustrates how, in the two year period following its launch, the iPhone/iPod touch’s mobile internet user base has enjoyed a faster, higher adoption rate (57 million) than NTT Docomo’s mobile internet platform imode (25 million) and even desktop Internet legend AOL (7 million).

Of course, it’s important to remember that Apple benefits (at least a little) from the changing times. Both AOL and imode enjoyed their super-growth in the mid to late 1990′s — the Internet’s Stone Age. While the iPhone platform is undoubtedly sophisticated, it takes advantage of extraordinary advances in hardware and software engineering that, a decade ago, were merely the stuff of geek dreams. Also, let’s not forget that — relative to the Internet’s ubiquity and sophistication today — the mobile and desktop Internet of the 90′s was far more expensive, harder to use and much less rewarding of an experience. Still, these are impressive numbers nonetheless. It’s just helpful to put them into perspective.

If you want a chart that demonstrates just exactly why AT&T’s network is trembling at the knees beneath the strain of millions of data-hungry iPhones, look no further. Schonfeld added two arrows to pinpoint the June 2007 and July 2008 launches of, respectively, the iPhone and iPhone 3G. If you’re an iPhone owner and you don’t spend more time using the thing for email and web browsing than, y’know, actually talking to people, you’re in the minority. iPhone owners love their unlimited data.

You can bet your bottom dollar Steve’s next keynote presentation will extrapolate some of this data (of course, his charts will contain no numbers but look way more sexy).

View or download the entire presentation from Scribd, and tell me in the comments how no one uses the word “Pwns” any more.

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I’m getting a copy (might pick up a burger, too), but for me it’s a legitimate business expense, so the decision, even without an upgrade path (I’ve just been using the Windows 7 RC on my iMac, and don’t have an existing retail license), it makes financial sense for me to have access to a Windows machine. Maybe you’re in the same boat.

The question isn’t really whether Mac users are also Windows users, since recent research on the subject seems to indicate that yes, there is in fact plenty of crossover. I’m wondering whether it might be the case that Apple fans not only buy Windows, but that we might also represent a big chunk of the early adopter crowd for this new incarnation.

Everyone I know who is buying a copy of Windows 7, upgrade or otherwise, uses a Mac. It may not be their primary machine (yes, that does actually happen), but they have one nonetheless. Most of those people are planning on installing Windows 7 on a boot camp partition or a virtualized PC using Parallels or VMware Fusion.

I know you’re thinking that I probably surround myself with like-minded people, and as a result have a lot of Mac-using friends, but that isn’t the case. The majority of people I know are exclusively PC users, and not a single one that I’ve talked to plans on upgrading today, or even in the near future.

As Mac users, we have a tendency to also be gadget addicts. I’ve found we’re more interested in all tech, not just our own, perhaps because we consider ourselves connoisseurs in the area thanks to our impeccable taste. For me, and for many others that I know, that interest translates into a pretty heady case of gadget-lust, one of the symptoms of which is early-adopterese. And also a willingness to acknowledge when a company besides our beloved Apple releases a smart, well-designed product.

Fact is, Windows 7 is a huge improvement on its predecessor. I say that as someone who’s been using preview versions since the first beta was released. It’s not Snow Leopard, don’t get me wrong, but that won’t stop me from being among the first to jump on board. Anyone else making that jump today? If you are, what are your reasons? Do you consider yourself an early adopter with tech in general?

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That opportunity will possibly come in a series of ads contrasting Windows with OS X, at least according to Peter Burrows of BusinessWeek. The expected campaign is expected to take Windows 7 on directly, and will likely “poke fun” at the upgrade process, from backing up data and reformatting drives to reinstalling software.

“Any user that reads all those steps is probably going to freak out. If you have to go through all that, why not just buy a Mac?” says Schiller.

The idea is that, rather than upgrade, people will be buying new computers, but the problem with Macs — especially in difficult economic times — is price. To that end, rumors continue to swirl regarding price reductions. Just last week, Google AdSense placements temporarily appeared in several European countries hinting at new iMacs, Mac minis and MacBooks. While only the Mac minis listed lower prices, it’s certain that new MacBooks and iMacs will have speed and storage increases, and the rumor of Blu-ray for the iMac persists.

In the interview, Schiller deflected inquires about new Macs and lower prices, remaining dismissive towards Windows and predicting a poor upgrade rate for Windows 7 compared to Snow Leopard. In the end, Windows is “still Windows.”

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Having looked at the data on Windows release dates, Marshall “found no negative correlation between them and Mac sales.” Further, Marshall suggests that “new OS launches from MSFT may have even acted as a ‘delayed accelerant’ to AAPL’s computing sales.” However, he is also careful to add that “AAPL’s success (or failure) in the computing market is largely idiosyncratic (or company-specific) in nature and not dependent on others in the industry.” Just like a six-figure analyst to have it both ways, but he does have a point, at least about Apple.

While it’s true that the numbers don’t lie, they don’t tell the whole story in this case, either. Not shown on the chart is how the release of Windows 95 was an unmitigated disaster for then-Apple Computer. The company saw Mac market share effectively halved from 1995 to 1996, from around double digits to 5 percent in a year, and it only got worse.

That bump in sales in 1997 was due to the original iMac, as was a good deal of the spike that ran until 2001. And 2001, of course, brought the tech bust, not a worldwide embrace of Windows Millennium Edition at the expense of Apple. While Mac sales were stagnant over the next several years, even as PC sales grew, the basis of the Mac Renaissance we now enjoy can be traced to a few key events.

• Beginning in 2002, the continuous, incremental improvement in Mac OS X combined with the perceived security disaster of Windows XP changed attitudes about Microsoft and Apple.
• The iPod Halo Effect, the idea that the popularity of the iPod encouraged the Mac “curious” to switch, probably started in late 2003 with the iTunes Store and iTunes for Windows.
• The switch to Intel in 2006, along with the “safety net” of Apple’s Boot Camp or third-party virtualization, removed the last perceived obstacle to owning a Mac.

So, the iMac, the iPod and the iTunes Store, OS X, Intel Macs, and now the iPhone; all these “idiosyncratic” products are what have fueled Apple’s comeback, though it’s also fair to say Microsoft’s lack of innovation played a small part in that comeback, too. Looking forward to 2010, it appears that trend will continue. Windows 7 does nothing more than replace lackluster Vista, Microsoft’s mobile strategy is a disaster, and how about a tablet PC with a stylus in the age of multitouch?

Really, the game is Apple’s to lose.

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For a limited time, Microsoft is offering students the opportunity to grab one Windows 7 upgrade to either the Home Premium or Professional versions of the upcoming operating system for only $29.99, the same price that the single-user version of Snow Leopard retails for.

That’s $90 cheaper than the Home Premium upgrade costs at regular retail prices, and $170 off the price of the Professional version. There is a catch, though. You need to have a valid student email address from a U.S. educational institution (college or university) in order to qualify.

AppleInsider claims that there are similar deals in place in the UK, Australia, Canada, France, Germany, Korea and Mexico, though I could only find a “Coming Soon” notice when I tried to change the country using a drop down menu at the top of the order page. Entering a valid Canadian university email address also got me nowhere.

Microsoft is very much aware that Apple’s student market share is one of the company’s most consistent strengths, despite recent incursions by low-cost netbook machines into that demographic. This deep discounting, and the accompanying 741.com micro-site on which it can be found show that Redmond is willing to go to great lengths to try to recapture some of the youth market.

If you’re planning on taking advantage of this deal using yours or a relative’s student email address to install Windows 7 on your Boot Camp partition, remember that the deal only applies to upgrades, not full versions, so you’ll already need either Vista or XP installed for it to work.

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First, a little background. I flirted with Macs in high-school Graphic Art lessons and then again, very very briefly, in the late 90s when a colleague handed me a PowerBook and said “Here, you could use that if it’s any good, but I don’t know if it even works…” It did work, but to be honest, it really wasn’t any use to me at all. Anyway, even if I had wanted to use the Mac, everyone I knew was working on a Windows PC of some flavor or other, and though the PowerBook had a working copy of Microsoft Office (such as it was in those days) incompatibilities were an ever-present problem.

Here’s an example of a conversation I had, many times, with the one person I knew who used a Mac;

Gloria: Liam, that file you sent me…
Liam: Yes, the Word document.
Gloria: It doesn’t work properly. I’ve lost all the formatting.
Liam: What do you mean, you’ve ‘lost’–
Gloria: It’s a mess.
Liam: Did you open it using Word?
Gloria: Of course I did! Look, will you just paste the text into an email for me, yeah?

I used to think the problem lay not with her computer, but more with her inability to use it. I later saw for myself, however, that she was absolutely right. Word documents created on a Windows PC didn’t fare well in Word on her Mac. Crazy.

The short of it is that I used Windows for everything and I had no compelling reason to want to switch. At home and at work, even on the road with my Windows Mobile devices through the years, I was 100 percent a Microsoft customer. Throughout those years, every experience I had with the Mac was a bad experience. And it was usually, as in the example above, related to the same tedious issue — incompatibility.

By 2005 I’d certainly heard about Mac OS X, though the closest I came to it was reading Paul Thurrott’s reviews and opinions on his SuperSite for Windows. He spoke of a decent OS, but reassured me that I was missing nothing. Then Apple released the iPhone and, despite my aversion to all things Apple, the Geek in me couldn’t resist and I bought one.

The experience on the iPhone was simply amazing, far better than any I’d had on any other device in… well, forever. It made me question my assumptions about the Mac. So in the summer of 2008, I wandered into the Apple Store on London’s Regent Street and spent a half hour pratting-about on different machines. I left with a MacBook. And on that very day, Windows died for me. Leopard was a breath of fresh air.

But let me be clear; I didn’t switch because I felt the Mac was a superior platform. Honestly, I feel that, for the majority of people, it’s no better or worse than Windows at the mechanics of making email, word processing and web surfing possible. I switched because it offered a far superior experience in doing those everyday things. When I think about Windows and where it fails for me, it always comes down to that same issue; experience.

Despite the “XP” in its 2001 OS name, it was only with Windows Vista that Microsoft finally seemed to “get” that user experience matters. Yet, beyond Vista’s eye candy there’s not a lot in the way of a unified, cohesive and organic experience that makes me want to use it as my everyday computing environment. This isn’t blind fanboy-ism talking; I used Vista since its Longhorn days right up until last summer, so I know I gave it a long-enough evaluation!

The user experience in Windows 7, too, has not changed since Vista, save perhaps for the addition of some fiddly new UI gimmicks (Aero Peek anyone?). To me, 7 ‘feels’ just like Vista did. I keep moving around the OS hoping to have an epiphany; “Aha! There’s the cohesive, rewarding experience I was searching for!” — but it just doesn’t happen.

I want to like Windows 7, but after trying various beta builds for the last year and repeatedly doing my best to enjoy it, I found myself feeling relieved whenever I returned to the elegant lines of Mac OS X.

I don’t hate Windows 7. I don’t think it’s shoddy, unattractive or fundamentally flawed. But just as Thurrott would say of Snow Leopard, when it comes to Windows 7 there’s just not much there. Windows 7 is a perfectly capable operating system that looks nice and gets the job done. Ultimately, however, it’s just not very interesting and, for recent switchers to the Mac, it’s too little, too late.

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As more and more households have multiple PCs, the idea of a “family pack” (i.e., a piece of software with multiple licenses for use) makes a lot of sense. Since Apple and Microsoft are set to release new versions of their respective operating systems this fall (Apple’s Snow Leopard in September, Microsoft’s Windows 7 in October), let’s look at the family pack available for each.

Microsoft

Microsoft finally ended all rumors of a Windows 7 Family Pack, announcing that there would indeed be such a product:

The Windows 7 Family Pack will be available starting on October 22 until supplies last here in the U.S. and other select markets. In the U.S., the price for the Windows 7 Family Pack will be $149.99 for three Windows 7 Home Premium licenses.

It’s not that paying $150 for three licenses is a bad deal, it’s just that the paragraph above pretty much constitutes the entire announcement, which is bad because…

• Where is the Family Pack for Professional? What about Ultimate? Sadly, there is no such thing. Why isn’t Microsoft making its other OS editions available in similar “family friendly” offerings?
• It’s only for a limited time (“until supplies last”). This is a software product on disc that comes with a three-user license, there are no “supplies.” The only thing that can run out is Microsoft’s willingness to provide this value to the consumer.

So Microsoft will thwart consumers who desire Professional or Ultimate by requiring full licenses even if they want to run it on all the PCs in their home. This is practically an engraved invitation to pirate the software.

Further, after some as-yet-unnamed amount of time, the Home Premium deal will be withdrawn. Perhaps this is just a maneuver to juice up early interest and sales for PR purposes, and once they can report large numbers of licenses sold they’ll just end the deal.

Apple

Apple’s upcoming Snow Leopard will be sold in family packs of five licenses for $49. This is a better deal than Microsoft’s in many ways:

• Obviously, $50 for five license is much better than $150 for three.
• Unlike Microsoft, Apple doesn’t offer “crippled” editions. Their family pack will consist of the full (“Ultimate”, to use Microsoft’s term) version of Snow Leopard.
• There is no expiration date on availability.

Aside from its OS, Apple also offers family packs for their iLife and iWork suites that are incredible values.

Conclusion

While I’m not suggesting upgrade pricing alone would be a reason to switch to a Mac, I do believe Apple’s family packs (which are not new) are an impressive, and important, value. I consider them part of the Apple value equation; a computer is a combination of hardware and software, not just one or the other.

I think Apple’s philosophy on family packs is clear. Put simply, they take the sting out of wanting to run multiple licenses for multiple machines. They provide such an excellent value, the consumer has little issue with legitimizing multiple software copies in their home.

For Microsoft, this is new territory. I’m glad to see there was some truth to the earlier rumors, but it all falls short. While the family pack for Windows 7 is a smart move, Microsoft is misguided to limit it to just the “cheap” edition and to make the offer short-term. Indeed, why not encourage people to legitimize multiple copies, and up-sell Professional, by offering a family pack at the high-end? If the goal was to limit piracy, I believe it will have only a minimal impact there.

Nonetheless, if your decision to use Windows 7 is already made, and Home Premium is what you desire, then I’d certainly recommend snapping up the family pack before Microsoft changes its mind.

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Windows 7 pricing was made official not long ago, and the general consensus is that, despite a slight drop in Home Premium pricing compared to Vista, it’s too expensive.

Still, there are some in the Microsoft community that try to justify it by comparing it to Apple’s pricing for Mac OS X. Microsoft can never win this game. Heck, Microsoft never even gets in this game. And yet, you have folks like Ed Bott at ZDNet giving it a shot. Here’s his latest salvo:

In two recent posts… I took a closer look at the differences between Windows 7 editions and their counterparts from Apple.

That’s from the first sentence, and already the article is off to a misguided start. There are no “counterparts from Apple” to Windows’ OS Editions. Every Mac OS X sold is — to use Microsoft’s terminology — Ultimate. Let’s keep that point in mind.

In previous posts, Bott had taken some criticism because Apple offered a Family Pack, something Microsoft would not talk about for Windows 7. But now he thinks Microsoft has beat (or is at least competitive with) Apple there. He supplies a partial screenshot of the license agreement for Windows 7, and then clarifies it with this:

If you can’t read the screen shot, here’s the relevant section: “If you are a ‘Qualified Family Pack User’, you may install one copy of the software marked as ‘Family Pack’ on three computers in your household for use by people who reside there.”

Bott seems pretty excited about this. To his credit, I appreciate that he understands a Family Pack is not a particular luxury any more. There are simply too many households with multiple PCs. Microsoft is still silent on the issue, so Bott has to speculate:

I’m going to go out on a limb and predict that Microsoft prices the Family Pack at $189, which is $10 less than Apple’s Family Pack (although Apple’s license is good for five Macs in a single household).

I appreciate that Bott points out five licenses are greater than three. However, to do so parenthetically minimizes that five licenses is a lot more than three. It’s 66 percent more, to be precise. Based on Bott’s price guess, it means you’re getting two additional licenses for 10 bucks! I’d say italics and bold were called for more than parenthesis.

Further, Bott again ignores that Mac OS X licenses are Ultimate, not two notches below that in the form of Home Premium. (Bott’s tack regarding the whole Professional and Ultimate thing is to simply claim you don’t need them, doing so with a cheesy marketing checklist of cherry-picked OS “features”.)

The biggest fact Bott ignores — and I played along, because Apple wins anyway — is that Snow Leopard will be $29, and the Family Pack $49, for users of Apple’s current OS. Even if you’re using an older Mac OS, Apple offers a sweet deal via a boxed set containing Snow Leopard, iLife, and iWork for just $169. Throwing in the latest iLife and iWork is a major plus since Leopard and Snow Leopard have features the latest “i” versions can take advantage of.

Finally, the above great pricing is not “special,” or “pre-order,” or “limited time,” or “mail-in rebate,” it’s simply The Pricing.

I think it’s time to get Lauren and have a series of “OS Hunter” ads. “Hmm, this OS is $29 and contains all these great features, this one is $120 and is two steps down…”

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One of the best reasons to get a new MacBook Pro, aside from the dazzling new screen on the 13-inch, and in spite of the SATA capping that’s apparently in place, is the extended battery life courtesy of the new built-in lithium polymer batteries. And by all accounts, even if you won’t necessarily reach Apple’s estimates, you will get more usage out of your notebook without having to connect to a power source. Or you’ll get more usage as long as you’re not running in Windows under Boot Camp, that is.

AnandTech’s Anand Shimpi has been running a MacBook Pro 15-inch through its paces over at his site, and while he was very impressed with the machine’s new battery overall, he noticed a considerable disparity between apparent power consumption under OS X, and under Vista. Nor was the difference marginal. Running OS X while only web browsing, Shimpi was able to coax a little over eight hours out of the notebook under OS X, and only six using Vista. That’s a two hour, or 25 percent difference.

Windows 7, which is supposed to make up for a lot of the mistakes Microsoft made with Vista, fared no better. The RC 1 version of the upcoming OS lasted only 5.48 hours using the same test conditions. Some of that can be ascribed to there not being final, optimized drivers for Windows 7 yet, but I doubt that accounts for the more than two-hour deficit it has compared with OS X running on the same hardware.

Windows supporters will no doubt chime in with claims that the Apple hardware is to blame, but Shimpi found some reason to believe that may not be the case. He spoke to a number of PC OEM manufacturers to see if they’d found a difference in battery life between OS X and Vista, and though none would officially go on record, some at least admitted to seeing a similar difference to the one Shimpi had found.

Since Apple doesn’t officially support any third-party hardware, it’ll be hard or even impossible to prove that OS X is, in fact, a more battery-efficient operating system, completely independent of any hardware considerations. Still, that’s one less reason to ever commit sacrilege by dual-booting your Apple notebook, which is bad news for Windows sales, no matter what the cause.

All you hackintosh experts out there, feel free to chime in with your own battery life tales, since your experience running OS X on non-standard hardware might be the closest thing we can get to a fair standard for comparison.

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Yes, I know “RC” designates Windows 7 as a Release Candidate, but a better designation would be Reality Check.

Windows 7 is an improvement over a very bad Vista, OK? Big deal. Let’s not pretend it’s more than that. The signal-to-noise ratio from some quarters is getting ridiculous.

Let’s look at the reality check:

• Did they address that whole sluggish performance thing? Not really.
• Did they address that whole confusing number of editions thing? Not really.
• Did they address that whole XP compatibility thing? Not really.

I installed Win7 beta on my MacBook a few months back, and recently installed the reality check on my iMac. Most of the improvements Microsoft made in either version are fine (especially those that pay homage to Mac OS X), and driver support is better, but this would all have happened to Vista in 2.5 years anyway.

Steve Ballmer said it best: Win7 is just Vista done right. Fine, but the problem is that Vista was never anything more than a replacement for what was at the time a 6-year-old XP. It had long since lost the shine, promise, and propaganda of a Longhorn we never got. And even with the broken promises, Microsoft still couldn’t get it “right” until now.

I did not upgrade to Vista. It was a horrible release that had issues even with new hardware, let alone the 2-year-old PC laptop I owned then. My experience with Vista, like most peoples’ at the time, was a disaster. I went back to XP and never looked back. But at some point one must question the sense in using an OS struggling under the weight of issues and security concerns rooted in decisions made a decade ago.

The biggest thing Windows 7 has going for it, by far, is that while after six years XP was showing it’s age, after nine it’s almost comical. The hardest reality check for Microsoft is that XP had to become so dated to make their “new” OS finally look reasonable by comparison.

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Microsoft has already experienced the power the netbook has to open up operating system options for PC consumers, since it saw Linux distributions being included as the default operating system on consumer-oriented machines for the first time with the advent of the small, affordable, feature-light machines. They’ve since managed to gain a foothold in the very lucrative market by staving off the end-of-support date for Windows XP, and it looks like they’re making sure Windows 7 is better suited for netbook use than Windows Vista was to ensure continued presence in that market.

But will it be enough? Recent reports suggest that others are poised to enter the fray, and the winner could well be determined by who provides an OS that can best deal with the hardware constraints presented by the netbook’s small form factor and lower price point. The new competitors Microsoft might have to deal with have already bested them in another mobile arena, that of smart phones, so it looks like competition will indeed be fierce. The new companies vying for the netbook market share look to be none other than Apple and Google. Round 2! Fight!

Apple, as we reported yesterday, seems to be working on a small touchscreen device, something which seems even more likely today, thanks to corroborating reports from the Dow Jones news service, which cites two sources “close to the situation.” The Dow report goes into even more detail, describing the size of the screen (9.7 to 10 inches) and reiterating the second half of 2009 launch date for the device. Has it struck anyone that Snow Leopard will in fact be the perfect version of OS X for running on netbook hardware? The whole purpose of it is basically to improve the performance and lower the processor footprint of Leopard. In retrospect, it seems like Apple was telegraphing their plans, and I just wasn’t clever enough to pick up on it.

Google seems ready to bring Android into the netbook realm, at least according to a report at DaniWeb about how support for mobile internet devices (MIDs), which could easily apply to netbooks, is hard coded into the OS, even though we’ve yet to see it borne out in real-life application. And why not? Their own Chrome browser is basically tailored to netbook use, and having it supported by a lightweight, touchscreen-capable OS is the perfect recipe for netbook success.

At the end of the day, we have to remember that each of these companies is, first and foremost, in the business of making money. That means that a revenue generator like the netbook can scarcely escape their notice. And it’s basically impossible, considering the numbers netbooks are putting up, that companies like Google and Apple who devote massive spending to R&D would just give it a pass. Much more likely they’ve just been playing their hand close to their chest, but pretty soon, I think we’re going to see all the cards on the table.

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While the above is nice, I’ve seen a few comparisons of this windows management to that of Apple’s Dock. The problem there is that OS X’s windows management is not handled by the Dock. About the only “window management” you get from the dock is that if you right-click an icon the popup menu will list open windows. Big deal. 

If you want to compare Windows 7′s windows management to that of OS X, then you have to compare the new taskbar features to that of Apple’s Expose and Spaces. In this comparison, in my opinion, Windows 7 falls far short. 

One thing to consider is that Spaces is fully customizable, and you really should look into the way you work and set it accordingly. By default there are four spaces, but for my work I decided that six made the most sense. I’ve set them up as follows: 

• Space 1 – My information space. Mail, Address Book and iCal run here. 
• Space 2 – My “web” space. NetNewsWire and Safari run here. I probably spend more time in this space than any other. 
• Space 3 – My music space. Generally, iTunes is always running here, and GarageBand opens here as well. 
• Space 4 – My productivity space. All the iWorks apps open here. 
• Space 5 – My media space. Aperture, iPhoto, iMovie, Graphic Converter, and others open here. 
• Space 6 – My “Microsoft” space. VMWare Fusion (I have VMs for XP and Win7) and Microsoft’s Remote Desktop open here. So does Firefox, since its home page is set to quickly check my Outlook email. 

In addition to the above, I have numerous apps designated to “float” from space to space. Essentially, these follow me to any space I enter. A few of these are: 

• iChat
• TextEdit
• Preview
• Finder
• Dictionary
• Skitch

There are more, but the idea is these are apps I don’t want to be “cut off” from just by swapping spaces. 

With all the above, Spaces and Expose work beautifully together to make a boatload of open apps and windows seems trivial. Easiest way to show this is via some screenshots. 

Below is Space 5 (you can see the number in the menu bar). I generally run my media apps full screen. 

Below is the same space with Expose activated. You can see I have TextEdit and iChat open, and since they follow me from space to space they are available here. 

Below is Space 5 with Spaces activated. You can see all I’ve got going on with this shot. The front window in each space is what happens to be in front at the time I invoked spaces. 

Now let’s take this to the final step, and invoke Expose after Spaces. You can see that every window is available to me with just a click, no matter what space it’s in. 

I am constantly switching windows, so another important form of customization is in how you choose to invoke Expose and Spaces. 

On later model Macs F3 invokes Expose, and on the unibody MacBooks a four-finger swipe down does the same thing. Since I think the glass trackpad on the unibodies is one of he greatest Apple advancements in recent years, I always use it to invoke Expose. However, aside from the four-finger gesture, I’ve set it to activate when I move to the upper right screen corner. As for Spaces, by default it’s in the Dock, but I remove that and invoke it by moving the cursor to the lower left screen corner. Since I’m right-handed, the gestures to lower-left and upper-right screen corners are most natural to me, and make switching windows incredibly fast. 

The beauty of Apple’s windows management implementation is that by spreading out your apps among various spaces, no one space ever tends to overwhelm you. Personally, I never need to hide apps any more. 

Further, there are customizations of Spaces for switching between spaces, or switching directly to a space, with the keyboard. And Expose has customizations to show all windows, or just those of the current app, or clearing all windows and showing just the desktop. The latter is particularly helpful in that once the desktop is exposed it’s “live”. By that I mean you don’t just get to view it, as Windows 7′s desktop feature allows, but you can actually grab icons and “hold” them while sliding the app windows back in “underneath” what you’re holding.  

In my opinion, Mac OS X’s windows management is still light-years ahead of Windows 7. If you’re not taking advantage of what OS X offers in this regard, then you’re missing out on some very efficient ways to work.

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Paul Thurrott has a write-up on the editions at his Super Site for Windows. He was “critical” of Microsoft for their edition strategy for Vista, and is now a major cheerleader for 7′s set of editions. He believes Microsoft has really simplified things. Lost on Paul is that when a 2,000+ word article is required to outline the various editions, it’s not simple. There are too many versions, but I’ll get to that shortly.

The Windows 7 Edition Lineup

Here’s what will be available when Win7 is released:

• Starter
• Home Basic
• Home Premium
• Professional
• Enterprise
• Ultimate

Whew! Right now you’re thinking, “Six Editions! How can that possibly be simpler than Vista?”. Well, in many ways you’re right, but the editions are better than before, and for a lot of users it’s likely going to come down to just two choices. Let’s take a brief look at each.

Starter

This is probably the closest thing to a “Netbook Edition” Microsoft will go. They needed a flavor of Win7 in this market or it would be either XP forever or cede it to Linux. Neither was acceptable, of course, so they have an edition available globally for this purpose.

Its restrictions (e.g., “you can run only three applications at once”) virtually ensure no one will put it on anything other than a low-power netbook, which is just how MS wants it (i.e., you want more, you pay more). Further, it’s for new PCs only (no retail box), so MS isn’t too worried about non-netbook machines making do with this version.

Remember that Microsoft says Win7 has a small enough footprint for Home Premium (or others) to run fine on a netbook. However, I suspect the license price of those editions would keep many netbooks from being “affordable,” a major selling point of that market. Obviously, Microsoft would have no issue with this, but I think Starter is necessary so that truly low-cost netbooks could go with a “modern” Microsoft OS.

Home Basic

This is where Microsoft gets tricky, or greedy, or whatever you want to call it. You need to read towards the end of Paul’s article to even see this one, as he calls it “hidden.” Unlike Starter, this will not be available globally, but rather only in “emerging markets.” I think this is Microsoft-speak for “low-cost PC markets that would otherwise pirate another edition.”

Why not just use Starter for this purpose? I think Microsoft wants to wring every buck they can get out of this. While Home Basic will have to be cheap, I suspect it’ll grab a few more bucks than Starter, which MS targets for netbooks only.

Home Premium

This is one for new PCs and retail box sales. Unlike Starter and Basic, it comes with Aero and most of the other cool visuals/features everyone’s heard of. The features left out of this edition the average user is not likely to miss.

Professional

Best thing about this is the name. Yes, calling your software or hardware Pro is the oldest trick in the book, and is more for appealing to the ego of the user than anything else. But it sure beats the heck out of Business as a name.

It also makes sense from a feature standpoint, as Pro includes everything in Home Premium, and then adds, well, “pro” features like Domain Join, Remote Desktop host and Presentation Mode. Like Premium, this edition will be available in retail box and new PCs. Expect “high-end” PCs to come with Pro. It just sounds better. It’ll likely be a pretty popular BTO upgrade as well.

Enterprise

Obviously, a huge market for Microsoft and a way to give discounts to this customer base. Enterprise is basically Ultimate but with volume licensing. You won’t see it on new commercial PCs or in retail boxes.

Ultimate

You see? Even “pros” don’t get everything. I think Ultimate is yet another money grab to wring every last dime outta their market. It’s basically Pro “plus.” Included are such must-haves as BitLocker and Branch Cache.

Ultimate will be available at retail and on new PCs, but the feeling is that it’ll likely just be there as a BTO upgrade option on PCs. Ultimate: When Only Everything Will Do.

What Microsoft Got Right

• I think Starter makes sense from a netbook standpoint. It puts a current Microsoft OS squarely in the game, even as more expensive netbooks can use higher editions.
• Each edition is a true superset of the one preceding it. This takes away the confusion of balancing what you gain, say, in Vista Business, with what you lose by not getting Vista Home Premium.
• They will emphasize Home Premium and Professional, even downplaying Ultimate. Six versions, but they’re going to rely primarily on two, which are solid versions.

What Microsoft Got Wrong

• I think Home Basic is unnecessary. Again, I see it as a grab for a few more bucks from “emerging” markets. Strip a couple restrictions from Starter and let that be your basic version.
• Given the above, Home Premium could then be just Premium, which sounds better, and is a nice counter to Professional.
• Ultimate is unnecessary. Again, a quick grab for a few more bucks. Toss everything into Professional and let Ultimate die. Besides, having a product that admits every other edition is lacking features is kind of stupid, in my opinion.
• No matter how much Microsoft downplays all but Home Premium and Professional, those other versions are out there, and they will confuse the market. Why go there? Microsoft learned from Vista, but not enough.

Conclusion

In my view, Microsoft should have gone from Starter (global netbooks, emerging country low-cost PCs), Premium (what 70 percent of consumer PCs would come with), Professional (for “pros”, those who want to be, or those who simply want everything), and of course Enterprise (volume discounts on Professional).

It would be much easier to articulate the above versions (because they make sense), instead of clouding the issue with a Home Basic and Ultimate version.

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