You know, I never played the Apple vs. PC game. I chose a PC because that was the first one I used and the only one I used regularly in university. I did do some minimal developing on an apple computer in the late 80s. But I stuck with the PC because, if need be, I could batter it into doing what I wanted it to do. From what I learned about Macs, it was harder and more dire to batter the pretty lil things into doing something.

So, i accepted that for certain uses the Macs would be better and for PCs would do it for other things. But honestly, I did believe that Apple probably did some things better than a PC. It took years for a PC to become an easy beast to network. Hell, even now my XP Pro home PCs lose standard networking setup for no good reason. I assumed that Apple would have paid attention to the failings of PCs and learned to bypass them.

But a recent kufuffle has me losing my (albeit not really invested) faith in the Apple kingdom. You see, a recent firmware update (EFI 1.4) broke the windows side of Bootcamp. Well, Bootcamp wasn't anything but Beta in the old OSX, i.e. Tiger and earlier, as in 10.4. The two major discussions on Apple Forums, state very clearly that this firmware update is affecting every user who had another OS installed on the Bootcamp. Surprisingly, this is still a small subset of the Mac world. And you might think that now that Leopard (got my copy today !) would fix this as they make Bootcamp legal and real in the OSX world. That would be fine, if for the fact that the update to the EFI was not a software related issue but in the actual hardware that affects the video drivers for the OS on the other partition. Go ahead, wipe your MacBook Pro and install Leopard and then setup Bootcamp with your legal copy of XP (I have one I can use, a real live paid for copy of XP) -- it won't work.

And Apple is not saying a thing about it yet. They didn't really have to until the weekend. They didn't officially support Bootcamp or the ways it interacted with the firmware. I just hope they do so soon as the, "We don't know and we don't care!!" attitude coming from their official support lines (we called, we have a real machine here in the office that requires XP to be running on the MacBook Pro) is not very encouraging. Dweebs. October 31 07