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Analysts believe that Boot Camp, which was released as a public beta ahead of the inclusion of the finished version in the next major revision of Mac OS X, could make Macs more attractive to a considerable number of PC users who, for one reason or another, still want to be able to run Windows software.

'It makes the Mac the most versatile computer on the market,' said Tim Bajarin, a tech industry consultant at Creative Strategies.

Certainly if you have bought and use large amounts of Windows software or games, until now, switching to the Mac was not really an option. Creative Strategies believes that Apple was already well on its way to doubling its market share; Boot Camp will only accelerate the process.

Apple believes that most who switch to the Mac will be won over by its operating system.

'Most of them will switch and find they never need to run Windows,' Schiller said.

The decision to let Macs run Windows will put pressure on the company's hardware

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division. Last month Apple joined BAPCo, an industry-wide organisation for computer performance benchmarking. With Windows on board, benchmarkers (such as computer magazines and websites) can now provide accurate, side-by-side performance comparisons between Macs and generic PCs.

At least Apple is controlling the process. Attempts to get Windows running on the new Macs have been widely publicised and ultimately successful. These efforts now appear to have been largely in vain, although the person who won the $13,000 first prize in an XP-on-a-Mac competition should not be too disappointed.

Apple may have had one more reason for developing this software. In January it signed a new five-year agreement with Microsoft to secure the future of Office on the Mac. Maybe Boot Camp was a sweetener for the deal.

The release of Boot Camp has inevitably raised questions over the future of Virtual PC, software now owned by Microsoft that enables Windows to be run within the OS X environment. VPC has become an indispensible tool both for Mac users in corporate environments who occasionally or even frequently have to run Windows software and for Web developers who use it to check how sites render in Internet Explorer.

Those users are unlikely to want to reboot, the market for VPC has not gone away, contrary to what at least one commentator, PC World's editor in chief Harry McCracken, said: 'Boot Camp almost certainly makes such a product superfluous'. And if Microsoft does decide - and it is a big if - to drop VPC there are several companies already working on similar products.