Hey, maybe Leopard will be sold with a Bootcamp that could still be installed and run on Tiger? Surely Apple could do that if it wanted to. That would be fair to Tiger Bootcamp users who don’t want to upgrade their machines to 10.5 right away.

But none of those are really the same as the policy toward users and technology. Then again, that’s kind of the problem if you try to generalize. Just my own feeling.

I think there are some patterns in terms of bricking iPhones, locking out developers, etc., and that I find a little more alarming, but not directly related to this Boot Camp issue.

They are forcing you to break the law to keep your system working as is, with no grace period.

That is not a customer friendly way of working in my book.

http://www.macworld.com/weblogs/editors/2007/10/applecriticism/index.php?lsrc=mwrss

The thing is it was very easy to misunderstand your post and to assume that All those windows partitions that people use these day would suddenly become “bricked” come leopard – and that does not make any sense, as the evidence does not support this.

* Your license expires when Leopard ships, but Boot Camp was unsupported beta software anyway.
* The bootloader — the screen that lets you choose between operating systems — should continue to function.
* The assistant for beta 1.4 will cease functioning, apparently at the end of 2007. Presumably 1.4 beta had the baked-in new expiration at the outside date, 12/31/07, just as earlier versions had their egg timers set for September 30 (the day Apple posted the support update).

So, I don’t want to get carried away: the practical upshot is, yes, you can keep running your dual-boot setup. You just have to ignore what Apple tells you to do and run the setup anyway, upgrading to Leopard on your own darned time. Like I said, just keep those lawyers away from your desk.

* The software is in fact expiring upon release of the new OS, according to all sources. Apple didn’t say exactly how this would occur in the case of the 1.3 / 1.4 beta, saying only the “license” would expire, you can’t use the software, and need to upgrade to Leopard. And yes, the boot loader *should* continue to work, possibly minus the assistant (that’s unclear). But here’s what Apple has to say about that, in their words:

“The license to use Boot Camp Beta expires when Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard is available to the public. To continue using Boot Camp at that time, upgrade to Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard.”

I think it’s pretty clear that they wanted me to read this as I did: you’ll need to upgrade *when* Leopard is available if you want to dual-boot.

I translated that as “the software will expire”, as did a number of other writers, and as I expect users might, because it’s in a support document that otherwise details software expiring (Boot Camp Assistant beta 1.2 and earlier).

I think that was incorrect, so I corrected it — twice in the article, and a third time in comments.

But I don’t think it’s a “rationalization” to criticize a support document entitled “When does Boot Camp Beta expire?” that avoids the question of when Boot Camp Beta expires and doesn’t explain fully what “expires” means.

* R Eunson I believe misread the ITWire article. It does NOT say the beta will last until the end of 2007, it says the end of the year or Leopard’s release, whichever comes first (and Leopard should definitely come first):
http://www.itwire.com/content/view/14692/53/

Anyway, we’re splitting hairs. My point is that an operating system update is different than an application update. An application you would expect to expire the day the new app is available, because it’s easy to update. An operating system is a different beast.

For comparison, Microsoft’s Vista beta expired May 31, not January 31 when Vista got its commercial release. Some kind of grace period clearly makes sense.

Okay, now, some people might say Vista beta is still going on, but that’s a different can of worms. ;)

Oh, and one other clarification: I haven’t yet announced whether I will be running for Galactic Coordinator.