I got a very interesting note from Apple in my inbox this week.  It appears as though the Boot Camp that many of us know and love will be expiring at the end of the year. If you’re running Boot Camp under Tiger and use the Windows side of things for anything really real, then you may be a bit of a pickle. 

 

Begin e-Mail from Apple:

Dear Boot Camp enthusiast:

We hope you’ve enjoyed the opportunity to preview an exciting new feature of

Mac OS X Leopard.

 

With the introduction of Leopard, the Boot Camp Beta program has ended. The Boot Camp Beta software

will expire on December 31, and Apple won’t offer further updates of Boot Camp Beta for Mac OS X Tiger.

If you’d like to continue using Boot Camp, Apple invites you to upgrade to Mac OS X Leopard.

Learn more.

Thank you for your participation in the Boot Camp Beta program.

===============================================================================

End e-Mail from Apple.

 

I honestly don’t know if you won’t be able to boot into your Windows partition or not on 1/1/08; but the sense that I get from the e-mail message I’ve included below, indicates that you will likely be out of luck…which kinda sucks. In order to keep using Boot Camp at all with either Windows XP or Vista, you will need to spend $129 bucks and upgrade to Leopard. How many people this effects and to what degree has yet to be seen, but it would have completely killed me if not for one interesting issue: I’m writing a review of Leopard for Gear Diary (http://www.geardiary.com) with Mitchell Oke, and I was fortunate enough to have Apple send me a copy of the OS to enable the review. (Thank you very much, Apple!!)

So, the long and the short of it kids is that you have 31 days or so to get it together and get your copy of Leopard before your Windows partition craps out on you. Don’t walk, run… The OS in and of itself, is well worth the upgrade; but more on that when we post the actual review!