Apple up like a rocket, Parallels and Virtualization

The hottest news in "digg.com" is that Parallels is providing support for Mac OS X 10.5 "Leopard".

And the second hottest is that Apple debuts a major advertising campaing in print.


See this excellent clip from the advertising that explains it all:

I have no positions on AAPL, nor Microsoft, and I do have only bearish positions on Intel, thus I am not trying to further my investments with this gratuitious publicity for Apple computers.

But everything they say in this excerpt is true. I have explained the many defficiencies that a Windows system has. Mac OS X, on the other hand, is based on Berkeley Software Development UNIX (BSD), and those roots make it several orders of magnitude more robust than any Windows, but yet the user interface has the characteristic good taste of Apple products.

That Mac computers work the way they should guarantees that Apple will multiply its market share this year.

To further convince the skeptics to at least give it a try, they now have a Virtualization offering, Parallels, to run inside a Mac any "PC" operating system such as Windows XP with is Microsoft Office and all while at the same time enjoying all the benefits of "Leopard". In my circle of acquaintances, those who have been exposed to Mac OS X and the excellent Mac computers get hooked, including "Yours, truly".

Also, the iPod market seems healthy and there are rumours about an iPhone which would combine cellular telephony with iPod functionality; a product that well done (not as the "Rokr", the "underwhelmer") pretty much gives Apple stock a very bullish outlook.

Unfortunately for us, Parallels, although is a true hypervisor that seems to make use of Pacífica (AMD-V) (at least suports something I don't know about called "AMD Secure Virtual Machine", AMD-SVM "that drives unmatched virtual machine speed, performance, stability and isolation on SVM-powered computers"), doesn't seem to support any AMD64 host nor guest operating system, at least according to the official web site (s). I think that I will be contacting Parallels to let them know that they are missing a large potential market, because today the best way to run an AMD64 operating system is relying on Virtual Machines with an OS at 32 bits with the drivers the AMD64 OS lacks, just like described in "AMD64 Practical".