Why did apple discontinue Boot Camp support for XP in Lion?

My understanding is that this was a conscious decision by apple and not a passive development because there is a simple workaround, but it requires a snow leopard disk.

That is incorrect. Having an SL disk would not help you. What makes Boot Camp work with a particular Mac is having the Windows drivers for the Apple hardware you have. Apple has to write those to work with the version of Windows they are for. The XP drivers for your new Mac will not be on a Snow Leopard disk.

This seems like a blatant anti-trust violation by apple bordering on fraud when you consider the way they market the supposed flexibility of their products.

Uh, in what way? Apple is not Microsoft. They had no need to make it possible for Mac users to boot into Windows at all. It's there to make Macs more accessible for longtime Windows users who have considered purchasing a Mac, but don't want to have to purchase Mac versions of their possibly extensive software collection, or have certain titles there is no Mac version of. Even newer PC hardware cannot run XP. So is Microsoft also doing something illegal by not providing drivers for this newer hardware?

The simple and correct answer is load XP in a Virtual Machine. You can give it 2.5GBs of RAM, or even 3.5GBs if you have 8GBs installed in your Mac, and 2 CPUs and it runs just fine.

Then you don't have to reboot every time you want to run something on the Windows side.

The SL disk provides the drivers that work just fine with newer hardware (I've seen step by step instructions on multiple sites)

That will be true only if the hardware itself hasn't changed, or has changed very little. Though there are actually a fair number of models like that at the moment, which in Apple's product history is a bit unusual. Practically the only difference between a year ago and now is that the models now ship with Lion instead of SL.

And when two competing businesses collude in a way that takes advantage of customers that's wrong.

You'd have to show me proof of that, first. But that's highly unlikely as computers and software have been doing this from day one. Anything you buy today will be practically obsolete within two years.

But as Shootist007 noted, if XP is something you need and you can't find a method to install it as a Boot Camp partition on your new Mac, then run it as a VM in Parallels, VMWare or Virtual Box.

Kurt Lang wrote:

That will be true only if the hardware itself hasn't changed, or has changed very little. Though there are actually a fair number of models like that at the moment, which in Apple's product history is a bit unusual. Practically the only difference between a year ago and now is that the models now ship with Lion instead of SL.

That is not correct. The newer late 2011 models have the most current chipset and CPUs offered by Intel. The early models used the older chipset from 2010 and first gen i CPUs.

The early models used the older chipset from 2010 and first gen i CPUs.

Yes, my mistake to mention the current models hadn't changed much. But initially (the models you mention) were the same as what shipped with SL, but then came with Lion. If you could get a hold of an SL set of gray disks for a Mac that shipped with Lion, they would work.

Yes even on the newest models.

But I tried installing XP in a BC partition with SL 10.6.8 on the newest models and the driver set that apple is now supplying is for Win 7 only. At least that is what I got.

XP in a VM is very good. there is No current software, that I'm aware of, that will not work on XP, IE needs Win 7, except maybe some MS software like the newer Windows Live Mail. But then who needs all that bloat.

But then who needs all that bloat.

It is incredible how much space Windows takes up. If I install Snow Leopard on an erased drive, the whole thing takes up something less than 7 GB of space. Windows 7 32 bit eats up 25 GB, and Win 7 64 bit, an astounding 54 GB! There has got to be a way for MS to trim that OS down.

Kurt Lang wrote:

But then who needs all that bloat.

It is incredible how much space Windows takes up. If I install Snow Leopard on an erased drive, the whole thing takes up something less than 7 GB of space. Windows 7 32 bit eats up 25 GB, and Win 7 64 bit, an astounding 54 GB! There has got to be a way for MS to trim that OS down.

Actually that 54GBs you are seeing is from the hibernate file and the Swap file. I have 7 64bit installed on a 45GBs partition on my Intel SSD with a ton of programs and it only takes up 17.8 GBs of space. Although most all my programs are installed to the D drive, second partition on the SSD, but no matter where you install programs they will always place some files on the system drive.

If you limit the swap file size (as Windows likes to make the swap file the size of the amount of RAM you have installed) and turn off the Hibernate feature (the computer still sleeps without having that enabled) that would cut down the overall space used significantly.

and turn off the Hibernate feature (the computer still sleeps without having that enabled) that would cut down the overall space used significantly.

I used to be an MS guy. Our first computer was a XT clone running DOS 3.1. For many years I built my own systems. In my line of work, Scitex and Heck (not the real name of the second company, but the bad word filter won't let me use the correct one) made the only equipment that could do digital color and retouching. Eventually, Photoshop and Macs became powerful enough to replace this proprietary equipment. That's where I started using Macs; in prepress alongside the proprietary stuff. Been using Macs ever since. So while I do still use Windows here are there (as rarely as possible), I don't read anywhere near as much as I used to on it.

So thanks tons for that tip. I'll be turning off Hibernate on my Win 7 install sometime today! Just need to look up how to do it.

Much better! I killed the Hibernation feature and cut the swap file from 16 GB to 8. Install now takes up 33 GB of space instead of 54. Still ridiculous compared to OS X.

Kurt Lang wrote:

Much better! I killed the Hibernation feature and cut the swap file from 16 GB to 8. Install now takes up 33 GB of space instead of 54. Still ridiculous compared to OS X.

If you are running with 16GBs of physical RAM you should be able to drop the swap to 1GB as minimum and maybe only 2 at Max. I run my desktop PC with 16GBs and have swap set to 1 and 1 Min/Max. Never any problems.

If you are running with 16GBs of physical RAM you should be able to drop the swap to 1GB as minimum and maybe only 2 at Max.

I'm sure I could. The only reason I have Windows on my Mac at all is for the very few times I have to access a site that still insists on using ActiveX to operate. That and two devices that only got their firmware device updates with Windows installers.

Of those, one died and was replaced with a unit with built in Wi-Fi, so it can grab its updates over the wireless router. The other is my internal Blu-ray burner (now a discontinued model). That one hasn't seen an update in almost two years, so I doubt that will ever change again.

So overall, Windows mostly just sits on a separate internal drive, taking up space.