Will Apple fix Boot Camp for Windows?

I wrote earlier about how Windows running on Mac hardware via Boot Camp appears to have serious battery-life issues — getting only around 2 hours of life on a machine that should offer at least twice that.

I speculated there was some sort of proprietary DRM-ish hardware layer that Windows was fighting against, but commenters thought that that the ACPI power profile that Apple offers is not sufficient. In any case, it seems consistent across all Windows versions on Mac hardware.

So I am glad to see that Apple will officially be supporting Windows 7 in Boot Camp later this year. I hope they track down the root of this issue.

Some might speculate that Apple doesn’t want Windows to run too well on Mac hardware. That would be a silly and passive-aggressive approach by Apple. Supporting Windows, but not well, is a yes-but-no approach. Seems to me that Apple is the kind of company that either does it right or doesn’t do it at all.

Apple has nothing to lose by supporting Windows as a first-class citizen on Mac hardware. It’s all the more reason for people to buy the hardware, which is where Apple makes its real money.

And Microsoft has every reason to make it work as well — they should treat Apple as a first-class OEM, and send some engineers down to Cupertino, stat.