MacMall selling Intel Macs with Windows XP!

[elsiedee]

I just received a catalog in the mail from MacMall. They are selling bundles with Boot Camp and Windows XP Home or Pro pre-installed on the Intel Macs (MacBook, MacBook Pro, iMac and Mac mini).

The ad includes a disclaimer which states: "Customer should only purchase and/or use Macs preconfigured with Windows XP for evaluation purposes. Customers may not be able to use the Windows XP software after the time-limited license of Boot Camp expires."

Some posters have been speculating as to whether Apple itself might do this. While I doubt it, at least one third-party has now taken this step.

The disclaimer includes a lot more than the snippet quoted above. The phrase "evaluation purposes" is interesting. What is a buyer of a Mac preconfigured with Windows evaluating? Apple offers no other solution at present for running Windows on a Mac. Telling a new customer that he may not be able to run Windows at some future date is likely to scare potential switchers away. Not everyone reads MacRumors

 

[EvilDoc]

i believe this has been posted before. but i'm not 100% sure.

 

[ilkevinli]

Yes it has. A long time ago.

i believe this has been posted before. but i'm not 100% sure.

 

[PlaceofDis]

and they aren't the only one either from my understanding, i think CompUSA sells them with Windows installed too, or at least has one or more display models booted into Windows.

but this has all been covered before.

 

[ITASOR]

If someone wants to buy a Mac because they want to run Windows on it, I would say just do it. There will always be a way, bootcamp or parallels or whatever else comes out to run Windows on it. Since they can do it natively, I don't think Windows support will go anywhere anytime soon.

 

[7on]

What would apple be able to do? There might be something that makes BootCamp the application unable to open after such and such date - but that won't stop you from being able to boot windows. Deleting Bootcamp still yields a bootable XP partition. All BC does is partition the HDD and burns Windows drivers. I'd be worried about being able to REMOVE windows in the future rather than being able to boot XP.