Apple wants you. It really does.

After years of appealing mainly to an audience of hardcore Mac fans, the company is increasing its market share and reaching out to a wider audience.

And that means you – the typical PCW reader who wouldn’t normally give the Mac a second thought.

For many years, Apple has actively courted switchers – people who previously owned a PC but have looked enviously at the stylish and elegant design of machines such as the iMac and the recently released Macbook Air.

The low-cost Mac Mini was specifically designed to attract people who were thinking about upgrading from an old PC and the company’s long-running ‘Mac vs PC’ ad campaign drums home the message that PCs are dull and geeky, whereas Macs are unspeakably cool.

Even so, PC users have proved resistant to the charms of the Mac over the years (and many found that the smugness of those Mac vs PC ads only hardened their resistance to Apple’s wiles). However, Apple has finally started to chip away at that resistance, thanks to a little piece of software called Boot Camp, which allows you to install Windows on a Mac and use it like an ordinary PC. Although possibly old news for many PCW readers, it’s a feature that tends to be forgotten.

In this feature we’ll look at the practicalities of using a Mac as your main Windows PC. We’ll also give you a quick overview of the current Mac hardware range. At the risk of being branded heretics, we’re focusing on Windows here rather than Apple’s OSX, although we will look briefly at what it has to offer.

Chip change
Boot Camp was made possible by Apple’s decision in 2006 to abandon IBM’s PowerPC processors and switch its entire product line over to Intel processors. Open up any Mac model today and you’ll find dual- or quad-core Intel processors based on the Core architecture, which are identical to those in the PCs we test every month here at PCW.

This was a momentous decision for Apple – indeed, many Mac users vilified Apple chief executive Steve Jobs for selling out to the ‘evil’ monopolists at Intel. However, the switch had knock-on effects that have helped to make Macs more attractive to PC users.

Macs have always had a reputation for being overpriced and underpowered compared to PCs. They may be better designed – just compare the ultra-compact Mac Mini to what passes for small form factor PCs – but you paid through the nose for the machine’s good looks. And Apple’s adoption of Intel processors was largely forced on it because the PowerPC processor hit a brick wall at around the 2GHz mark, while Intel went sprinting towards 3GHz.

Switching to Intel processors gave the entire Mac range a performance boost almost overnight. Using industry-standard components also meant that Apple was able to compete more effectively on price; it has openly stated that it doesn’t want to compete with low-cost PC manufacturers who pile ’em high and sell ’em cheap, but the Mac range is now competitively priced when compared to PC brands such as Sony and Toshiba.

Passing the Open Windows
So, given comparable price and performance, and undeniably superior design, it’s not surprising that many PC users have started to think about buying a Mac. The one remaining barrier was the operating system – Macs run Apple’s OSX Leopard operating system rather than Windows, which means software written for Windows PCs won’t run on the Mac. Software compatibility still prevents many PC users from contemplating the switch to a Mac – and that assumes the software you need is even available on the Mac in the first place.

While there’s a version of Microsoft Office for the Mac, and no shortage of creative software for graphics, digital photography and video editing, there are still plenty of Windows programs that aren’t available for the Mac. Games, in particular, are a real weakness for the Mac and, while there are Mac versions of Word, Excel and Powerpoint included in Office 2008 for the Mac, there’s no Access.