Apple to charge for BootCamp?

Author: Brett Thomas
Published: 23rd January 2007

What happens when your free product gets lots of good press? You start charging.

What happens when you've developed something that's getting tonnes of coverage, love from the press, love from your customers, and is providing a great deal of good will? If you're Apple, you start charging extra for it.

It appears that BootCamp may no longer be quite the same fantastic Mac "extra" that everyone had hoped when the company moved to Intel processors in mid-2006. Oh, it will still allow you a boot loader and still let you boot Windows natively, but one of its greatest features is going by the wayside - it used to be free.

Previous users of the free beta for the program will find that support for new drivers is discontinued at that time, though they'll still be able to use the program in its current form. The new price is expected to be $29.95, which is hardly a rip-off for such a handy program; but still, it doesn't beat free.

For your money, you won't only get continued driver support - Windows Vista is also expected to be fully supported in the retail version. You can expect the change to a pay version of the program around the time of Leopard's release. Of course, there is an alternative - apparently the boot loader is directly integrated into Leopard, so if you get the new OS then you'll have it anyways.

Have you got a thought on the move to pay-to-play-with-Windows? Or is $30 just not a big enough deal to care about when your notebook cost $2300 to start with? Tell us your thoughts in our forums.