Two of the things I dislike about Apple are their strong attempts to “upsell”, and their at-times blatant nickel and diming of customers.

Examples?

  • The 802.11n firmware update that cost $3 for “accounting reasons”.
  • The intentionally crippled calendar app on the original iPod Touch.
  • The iPod Touch firmware updates. (Yes, $20 for five apps that took more time and effort to disable than to leave alone – “accounting reasons” again).
  • The removal of boxed add-ins with later product revisions to increase margins – E.g. Apple Remote, The lack of a dock in the new iPhone, or how the iPod now comes with little more than a cable and a sticker.

One particularly close to home example is the new MacBooks. These are the first MacBooks with custom display ports that don’t come with an adapter – so after spending $2000 on a laptop you have to pay another $30 for a part that costs $2 to manufacture. Joy!

But I digress :)

After running Bootcamp setup and installing Vista 64-bit I pop in my OSX DVD to install the drivers for Vista 64-bit, only to see a message stating "Boot Camp x64 is unsupported on this computer".

Wha!?

I know you can install Vista 64-bit on a new MacBook Pro. I know that aside from an extra graphics card, the MacBook and MacBook Pro hardware is the same. So surely the MacBook supports Vista 64-bit!?

No. Pro models only – http://support.apple.com/kb/HT1846

At this point my bullshit detector is starting to sound. Looking at the contents of the DVD I find a number of self-installing drivers, and the BootCamp installer package that’s run by the setup program. Hmmm.. I wonder…

In the Start Menu Type “cmd”, then right-click on the program that appears and choose “Run As Administrator”.

Then enter;

D:
cd "Boot Camp\Drivers\Apple"
msiexec /i BootCamp64.msi

And hey-presto! After by-passing the Apple crippleware program all of the drivers and Bootcamp software install and run perfectly. Or at least as perfectly as bootcamp seems to work with the new touchpad – more on this another time.

Frankly this type of behavior is extremely disappointing. If a company such as Dell pulled this there’d be gangs of media howling for their blood. As usual though the “Apple smallprint” barely gets any attention.