The blogosphere is ablaze with news about Boot Camp, Apple new booting software that allows new Intel based macs to natively run Windows (no emulation here). Even Wall Street is taking notice.

The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW):
It seems that the geeks like you and me aren’t the only ones excited about Apple’s release of Boot Camp. This morning, Wall Street demonstrated a bit of support, too, as Apple stock rose 8% in early trading.

From an Arab regional perspective this could prove interesting. In a post last December I explained how the lack of an Arabic MS Office for the Mac is hampering the adoption of the platform in the Arab region. Anyone who uses Arabic Word has to think a million times before switching to the Mac.

But now that Macs can run Windows, a solution of this dilemma is on the horizon: now you can have your Arabic Windows Apps running in case you need them. This solution is not perfect, but for those who only occasionally need Arabic office, it can work.

One thing that needs to be tested is keyboard compatibility. Let’s hope the Mac’s Arabic keyboard layout works fine under Windows (it would be horrible if we had to add some stickers on our new Macs to make their keyboards Windows compatible!!).

Read these related posts on 360east:


Posted

in

,

by

Tags:

Comments

One response to “Macs run Windows: The Arab perspective”

  1. Khaled Avatar
    Khaled

    It is amazing to me (and this is not directed at Ahmad, just a generic comment) how users and geeks in the Arab World continue to ignore open source software.

    There is a lot of open source software that supports arabic very well (thanks mostly to the Arabeyes org) and that includes open office, which even has an arabic web site (http://ar.openoffice.org) to make it easy for you to download the software and get support and information.

    It saddens me that we are excited about paying for the operating system twice to get arabic support, when it is available for free, and in a way that gives more control over the software’s direction and features.

    Khaled