Apple reviewers queue up to tug forelocks

The first reviews in of the MacBook Pro and Parallels Desktop stop short of handing Steve Jobs an orb, sceptre, ermine cloak and bags of apes, ivory and peacocks, but only just.

Frank J. Ohlhorst in CRN says the two releases are a "shot in the arm" for the Mac.

Frank might be overegging the pudding by saying that being able to run Windows - or for that matter Linux, BSD, BeOS or other OSes -- on notebooks, "can fuel the adoption of Mac systems throughout the enterprise", but he clearly likes what he sees.

Even though he's looking at the beta - the commercial product shipped yesterday -- Ohlhorst finds that XP on a Mac is "very stable" and offers adequate performance. Virtual drive compression capabilities are also praised, as is the notion of dragging and dropping files between XP and OS X.

Funkiest of all, you can run one OS on each connected screen like some prog-rock keyboards wizard. Or a programmer.

The Washington Post finds that, "buying the MacBook -- or any other Intel-based Mac -- means never having to say 'I'm sorry, I can't run this program on my computer'."

Connected Home joins the chorus of those writing obituaries for Apple's Boot Camp, suggesting that Parallels, "has the potential to make dual-booting between two OSs as archaic as a steam-powered boat".

However, our reviewer does have a technical, practical caveat: "It's still virtualization and thus slower than a native PC. You'll also need oodles of RAM if you plan to run both Windows and the Mac OS. One other problem: Parallels uses a unique feature in Intel's Core Duo processor to coax as much performance as it can, but until the video-display hardware offers similar virtualization support, games and high-performance applications are a no-go." µ