New and Noteworthy: Buy a MacBook Pro with pre-loaded Windows XP; How to request features from your favorite Mac developers

Buy a MacBook Pro with pre-loaded Windows XP TUAW reports that a company called ExperCom is selling standard-specced MacBook Pros pre-loaded with Windows XP. "This is for those folks who want the beautiful Apple hardware and the ubiquitous Windows software without having to deal with Boot Camp themselves, I guess. We all knew this was inevitable, and fighting it is pointless. Still...just looking at that page sends shivers up my spine. At least they're happy to note, 'We don't support Windows XP - and neither does Apple. We'll install it for you, but, hey, we're Mac people, so we can't help answer Windows questions.'" More.

How to (and not to) request features from your favorite Mac developers Ars Technica polls some Mac developers regarding feature requests from users. "Both Paul from Rogue Amoeba and Brent Simmons of NetNewsWire fame have long but interesting posts up on their respective sites about how to properly and improperly make demands requests of them for new software features. Not surprisingly, users love to try to pull out all the old stops, such as passively-agressively threatening ("I'll only buy it if...")." More.

Apple Headed For Strong H2 Despite Likely Q2 Miss Forbes says that Apple will likely have a strong second half of 2006 even though Q2 numbers may be off a bit. "Following the March quarter results report, we believe the Street will start to place more focus on the back half of calendar 2006," wrote analyst Gene Munster in a report Tuesday. The analyst believes Apple will benefit from the full availability of Macs (MacBook Pro), new Mac releases (iBook, Power Mac), new iPods (larger screen video iPod, higher capacity nano), and tailwind from seasonality." More.

Previously on MacFixIt

• Parallels Workstation (Virtualization) software (#4): Version 2.1b4 released; No way to migrate Virtual PC disks
• Firefox 1.5.0.2 (#2): Problems with non-Universal plug-ins; Miscellaneous issues

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