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A lot of things have been brewing with Apple computer this past year. First the Intel Macs announcement, then they shipped the Intel Macs several months ahead of schedule and with dual core CPUs!

Now that Macs are using Intel CPUs, a lot of people wanted to know if they can run Windows on a Mac since they are now basically a PC computer packaged under the Apple brand. Problems came up when it was found out that Apple was using EFI instead of BIOS to boot the computer, which Window XP doesn't support so it doesn't even boot.

A contest was set up to see who can be the first to make Windows XP run on a Mac. A bounty was funded and last month, on March 2006, a solution was posted and the winner walked away with $13,000. The solution is posted on the OnMac.net website.

Yesterday, Apple announced the beta release of Boot Camp. It allows you to dual boot OS X and XP. Unlike the OnMac solution, Boot Camp comes with a graphical setup and with no need to reformat your hard drive. It also includes all the drivers you need to run Windows XP on your Mac and it's free!

With the Intel CPU announcement, it seems like a lot of developers suddenly became more interested in developing for Mac.

Today, a company called Parallels released a beta version of the first Virtualization Solution for Intel Macs also for free! Similar to Virtual PC, you run a different OSes under a Virtual Machine. Compared to boot camp, you don't have to reboot your computer to run Windows. It also supports all versions of Windows from 3.1 to XP, any Linux distribution, Solaris, OS/2, etc., whereas Boot Camp only supports Windows XP SP2.

From the looks of it, it seems to be even better than Virtual PC and it runs faster since it is driven by the Intel Virtualization Technology so you get near native performance.

All of these developments coming within a month of after shares of Apple (AAPL) has been tumbling to below $60 a share a week ago sent the stock up over $71 today.

This is even before the June buying season for the education market. Now, people who are thinking of buying a computer who hesitated buying a Mac would have less of a reason to try it out. Basically, you can now run any OS on one computer a Mac. Whether it be OS X, XP or Linux, you can run them all on your Mac...and look good doing it! You can't say the same if you're using a PC.

Next up is the Developer Conference in August and the announcement of Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard.

Boy, when the Apple marketing machine is keeping quiet, they're really quiet. But when they do announce something, it's usually big and comes one after another. Although these companies have no relation to each other (as far as I know). It makes you wonder whether they do this on purpose since they seem to be all happening at the same time.