Boot Camp, The Sales Pitch

There may be quite a bit of hype regarding Boot Camp, but I have no doubt whatsoever that it's going to be a major driver for Mac purchases this year - and there are pretty obvious ways to leverage it.

I dropped by FNAC Chiado today to pick up a copy of Going Postal (just to tide me over until my next mega-order arrives), and all the Intel machines on sight had this image on their screensavers:

The fact that there actually were iMacs and MacBook Pros on display is in itself noteworthy here in Portugal, but I'll let it pass for now. And no, I didn't check the MacBook's serial number...

Now this is a sales pitch - considering the way Macs are usually regarded here as "designer computers" (with a subtext of "useless for anything else"), this is going to help drive home the point that you can, in fact, use them for anything.

Of course, 99.9% of localized applications run in Windows, but you get the idea.

Incidentally, I've been getting a few requests for hints regarding Portuguese language support in Mac OS X, and I'm still at a loss as to address them, so this might be as good a time as any to point out that:

• the "Português de Portugal" option in International is hidden by default (you have to "Edit List...")
• the option isn't shown upon first-time setup (at least in base installs of Tiger), and it isn't set automatically when you set your time zone, location, etc.
• it still reads like Brazilian Portuguese in some places (which is probably the result of years of Brazilian translations of technical books flooding the market).

Still, I suppose I should count myself lucky it's even there.