I've been toying with the idea of moving over to an Apple Mac running the awesome Mac OS X Leopard for a while but I was concerned about running native Windows applications.  Now I don't need to worry anymore - I can take a bite of the forbidden Apple, I should explain what I mean. 

A friend pointed bootcamp out to me a couple of months ago during a Windows/Mac discussion.  Bootcamp is software from Apple that enables the new generation of Intel-based Macs to run Windows in native mode i.e. no virtualisation or emulation of any kind.  I had heard of bootcamp before but completely ignored it for the reasons which I'll touch on below.

Although one of my first real computing experiences back in the day was with an Apple Macintosh my professional life has seen me work with machines running Windows and Linux operating systems. 

This is made quite interesting by the fact that my educational experiences revolved around Unix based operating systems running on Sun Spark workstations - Ah! happy days.  This is not so surprising because I was in a Computer Science department at a UK University and all this was after my initial experiences with a Mac over 20 years ago.  Mac's were never really a consideration in the corporate environments in which I worked except for the odd employee or team that needed to use them. 

All these factors meant that even though I liked Mac's I was not really in a position to be a Mac user until now.   I'm going to spend some time looking around for the ideal choice and dive into the aesthetically pleasing world of Apple.