When challenged persistently on an issue, however, Apple tends to loosen its grip. For years, for example, Apple software would only burn DVDs on Apple-branded internal drives. The software shipped with Macs was limited to burning one hour of video to a DVD. After a lot of yelling that Apple pretended not to hear, and after users hacked a couple of widely used work-arounds, Apple eventually gave in on both issues. It’s Apple’s nature to try to squeeze its users now and then, and it’s Mac users’ nature to tell Apple to go screw itself when that’s what’s called for. It’s nice to have people with attitude watching your back.

“Apple’s got a smoke-and-mirrors hack that makes Macs run Windows.”

Boot Camp is a hack that alters a running copy of OS X so that the user can choose to run Windows instead at boot time. It is a very limited solution, one that Apple branded a beta by. Boot Camp seems intended to prove that, true to its word, Apple did nothing to keep Windows from running on an Intel Mac.

Dual-booting between operating systems is no more practical a solution for professional Mac users than it is for anyone else. In most cases, users will want to run OS X and another OS side by side. That’s a job for virtualization, and because OS X will allow itself to operate as a guest OS, it has to host other x86 OSes.

This it does, exceedingly well, with help from Parallels Desktop. This solution is imperfect -- display updates could be faster and there’s no support for 64-bit guests -- but it’s fast, effortless, and compatible with every imaginable 32-bit guest OS. Imposing small overhead, Parallels Desktop is an entirely practical means of running alternate operating systems on a Mac.

“Apple’s product line is tiny. All other Intel OEMs focus on choice.”

Apple’s catalog has just eight systems: iMac, 15-inch MacBook Pro, 17-inch MacBook Pro, white MacBook, black MacBook, Mac Pro, Xserve, and Mac mini. Apple departs from its Intel OEM brethren that feel it’s necessary to save a place in their product lines for every subvariety of Intel CPU. With Apple, you pretty much choose the shape you like best, and that determines what Apple puts inside.

Almost. When it cut the number of base configurations, Apple also raised the number of configure-to-order options. You can’t order a Mac Pro with a Celeron D, Pentium 4 Extreme Edition, or a single Core 2 Duo processor, but you can dial in up to four hard drives, two optical drives, and one of several graphics cards. Nonetheless, if you long for options in low-level items such as CPUs and chip sets, look elsewhere.

“Apple picked Intel when it should have gone with AMD.”

So far. AMD’s road map will take the company places that Intel can’t go. Sooner rather than later, Apple may find its margins and its ability to compete restricted by its CPU supplier, just as occurred before with IBM and Motorola. If necessity dictates it, Steve Jobs will take the stage at Macworld to welcome AMD as a supplier and intimate that Apple had planned that move all along. Today, Macs may or may not appeal to you as enterprise machines. But don’t underestimate the company’s drive to compete.