Apple's stroke of genius: Let people run Windows on their new Macs because heck, we'll sell a lot more hardware!

Apple has released a public beta of Boot Camp, a small application that creates a soft partition on your existing Mac drive (without having to reformat and partition the whole drive), lets you create a CD of hardware drivers, and then lets you install Windows XP Home or Pro (SP2 only) in that partition.

On this page, they say that OS X 10.5 Leopard will have this functionality built-in but that this is a beta that runs under OX 10.4.6.

They will sell a TON more of their hardware with this option. This means that people can try out a dual life. And eventually, they may just decide to stay on the Mac side.

Very clever Apple. Very clever. I can see them doubling their hardware sales within a year with this plan. If not more.