Apple to halt Boot Camp access for non-Leopard users

Apple said Wednesday that come the new year it will no longer allow customers to make changes to their Boot Camp dual boot partition unless they upgrade to Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard.

The software, which allows owners of Intel based Macs to also install and run versions of Microsoft's Windows operating system, made its debut in April of 2006 as beta software for Mac OS X 10.4 Tiger users.

In the 18 months that followed, the Mac maker utilized its Tiger user base to help test and debug the software, adding support for several services and features in addition to the new Windows Vista. It stated, however, that Boot Camp was a Leopard-bound feature and that versions for Tiger would eventually expire.

"We hope you've enjoyed the opportunity to preview an exciting new feature of Mac OS X Leopard," Apple said in e-mail to current Boot Camp beta testers on Wednesday. "With the introduction of Leopard, the Boot Camp Beta program has ended."

The Boot Camp Beta software will officially expire on December 31, and at that time the company will stop offering further updates of the beta for Tiger.

Apple thanked users for participating in the program and recommended that they upgrade to Leopard if they wish to continue using Boot Camp.

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35 Comments

ncee

said about 16 years ago

Here's hoping it's more like Parallels ? at which point in time, I'll take a look at it.

Skip

thunkdifferent.com

said about 16 years ago

One big questions ihave had is if Apple will cease to let Bootcamp function. For instance, the sorry saps that unlocked their iphones, only to have them frozen into a brick.

iDoubt apple will lock you out of your own partitioned drive, but if it does, that will be some bad press.

iThink most readers can continue their bootcamp rest assured however as bootcamp is simply going to be "unsupported" not "updated" in order to force a ubiquitous upgrade.

Anyhow, bootcamp for tiger was fun, i don't see why anyone would even need an upgrade, i'm not terribly impressed with Leopard as i have suffer hundreds of gigs of locked data and data loss.

i use it, but would be weary of bootcamp after the 31st, it is likely time to upgrade if you are using that feature, or to drop (gas!) $80 and get VMWare or parrells.

http://ThunkDifferent.com

SpamSandwich

said about 16 years ago

And the users of the Mac did go forth and purchase Parallels, and it was good.

unusualaspect

said about 16 years ago

>the company will stop offering further updates of the beta for Tiger.

that doesn't read to me that Boot Camp access will be halted, just that official updates from Apple will not be back-ported, not quite the same thing