Now here’s a funny thing.
Update: I’ve gotten a lot of tremendous feedback for this review, which I’ve been trying to incorporate back into the original. This feedback addresses both inaccuracies in the review (primarily about Apple’s method of determining which partition to boot from) and some information I simply didn’t know about. I’m not sure that I’d describe the review as a “living document” per se, but it’s interesting how much the community has been able to affect the review after its initial publication.
Paul Thurrott is one of my favourite bloggers. Not because he’s a good writer or I find him a particularly innovative thinker. No, the main reason is his ‘I’m desperate to get Mac fanboys to hate me’ approach to the world. I wonder how wonderful that ‘tremendous feedback’ really was. I think what he meant to say was… ‘I reviewed an Apple technology where I made some mistakes and ended up with a shit load of emails telling me how dumb I was’.
I think perhaps next time Paul might think about actually understanding a product before reviewing it. Take, for example this;
Before I could install the Boot Camp public beta, I had to install a firmware update. This process was confusingly communicated during the Boot Camp install process (Figure), which I didn’t appreciate. The online docs suggested going to Apple’s support page and typing in a search string, which I did, and I eventually did find the proper update, which came with its own confusing set of instructions (Figure). So much for the Mac’s ballyhooed simplicity.
Well, the firmware update instruction is in the Boot Camp installation guide and on the Boot Camp information page. Also the online docs don’t suggest going to Apple’s support page and typing in a search string they explicitly tell you to do that. And he thinks this is confusing.
In case it isn’t obvious, that means you need to be ready with a blank CD, an XP install CD that is integrated with SP2
How can it not be obvious? If you’ve read the instructions. You read the instructions right?
Then, you’re confronted with a graphical representation of the partitions that will be on your hard drive, giving you the ability to choose how much space you’ll commit to each operating system
I like the use of the word confronted here it implies that the Mac OS is somehow not cuddly and there’s nothing more likely to infuriate a Mac head than to imply that.
When you press the Start Installation button, the Mac reboots into XP Setup, which is a bit odd (Figure).
WHAT THE FUCK IS ODD ABOUT A COMPUTER REBOOTING IN TO XP SETUP WHEN YOU ARE INSTALLING XP?
Just be careful not to delete any of Apple’s hidden “dot” files, which litter a Mac partition like confetti.
Again implying the Mac OS has a fault. Only he doesn’t, what he says is true what he doesn’t say is more telling.
Back in January, when Apple announced the first Intel-based Macs, I purchased the top-of-the-line iMac model. This beauty–which set me back just over $2000–featured a 20-inch widescreen display, a 2.0 GHz Intel Core Duo processor, 1 GB of RAM, and a 250 GB hard drive. The idea at the time was that I would dual boot between OS X and Vista: Surely, I thought at the time, someone will get this all working soon.
It never happened
Now that’s just funny. He must be aware that it’s early April right? So ‘It never happened’ in the first four months of this year. What I find really interesting is that Paul doesn’t allow comments. You can email him but neither his Internet Nexus Blog nor his WindowsITPro site have a discussion section of any kind. Perhaps the holes people would shoot through his reviews would upset him.
