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Apple boots Windows 7 out of Boot Camp

New Macs fall foul of Cupertino's Drill Sergeant

The Cupertino fruit factory has decided to boot old versions of Windows out of the camp, quietly not-announcing that only Windows 8 and 10 will run on the latest flavours of the dual-boot "Boot Camp" utility that ships with this year's new Macs.

The new policy means that the recently-announced MacBook Air and 13” MacBook Pro machines won't boot into Windows 7 or prior versions.

The change emerged to the world via this post on Apple's support site, dated March 10 but largely unnoticed.

The decision is an inconvenience for sysadmins whose enterprise environments demand older browsers and therefore older versions of Windows, but no disaster because there's still the option to use a desktop virtualisation environment like Parallels Desktop, Oracle's VirtualBox or VMWare Fusion. And as we recently discovered, those can even run Microsoft BOB.

The decision to dump Windows 7 and its predecessors is hardly surprising, since Apple has been progressively dropping support for older Windows versions with each revision of its hardware. The 2013 releases dropped Windows 7 32-bit support, for example, while 2011 saw Vista and XP consigned to the dustbin of virtual dual boot computer history. ®

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