[conservatism_IS_compassion]

Apple should make a version of OS X, available for free for a limited time, which would provide the functionality of Parallels (or whatever) to keep a clean instance of XP at the ready to reset XP if it gets corrupted.

A way to continue to run XP, while providing user experience with OS X. A migration path. It would, perhaps, be hard limited in the amount of RAM it would support.

Apple won’t do it ‘cause they don’t own Parallel, and because they are growing their Mac sales without doing it.

[RBW in PA]

My wife works for herself and is locked into XP. Many of the programs she uses are not complaint with the newer operating systems. We looked into this and to upgrade the OS would require a $5K investment in new software and we would gain no new functionality. I’m sure many other firms are facing this same situation.

[dayglored]

My Mac Mini has VMware Fusion, with a WinXP VM ready to run at any time, it'll even do individual XP applications in their own windows which minimize to the OS-X dock as if they were OS-X apps. Slicker than two eels swimming in a barrel of snot, as they say.

And on the external hard drive is a reference/clean copy of the XP VM, ready to copy over to the main hard drive if for any reason the main VM gets corrupted, or I want to revert to an earlier time (e.g. before a test install of an application).

Parallels does approximately the same stuff, a little cheaper than VMware.

I don't see any reason why Apple would do anything like that, given that they already have BootCamp. BTW, VMware can also treat the BootCamp partition as a VM during OS-X operation. I don't know if Parallels will do that.