It’s been almost three years since I wrote a column welcoming Apple to the Intel fold ­ and so far it seems to have been an extraordinarily happy marriage.

No, my predicted quad-core home media server hasn’t yet come to pass, but my dream of a Mac running full-speed Windows certainly has.

Boot Camp, the nifty utility that lets users install and run Windows XP or Vista natively from a separate partition on any Mac with OS X “Leopard”, is one of those simple but incredibly effective ideas that must have done its fair share to push some wavering buyers into choosing a Mac rather than a PC.

Or at least that’s what Apple’s resurgent sales figures for the first quarter of 2008 seem to indicate. Boosting sales by over 50 per cent year-on-year is a neat trick at any time, never mind when the world economy seems to be falling down around our ears.

I’m no Mac lover, although as our magazine production staff use Macs, I come into regular hands-on contact with the fabled OS X. And I’m afraid I detest it every time. But I really do have a soft spot for the Mac hardware, apart from the awful keyboards and mice that Apple seems to insist on for its desktop models.

A lot of my PC-wielding work colleagues are of the same mind. OK, we’re not particularly keen on the old-style iMacs we have in our office, and they’re certainly no less prone to crashing or dying than the PCs, but the overall package, particularly the notebooks, is something that you can’t help but admire. Pull out a Macbook Air ­ - as one work colleague who just won one in a competition does with monotonous regularity ­ - and you’ll have a crowd of PC users around you in seconds.

For years, this admiration from afar was where it ended. But now that the penny has finally dropped, and more and more PC users have realised that you can run Windows perfectly well, a Mac is now seen as a definite option for otherwise dyed-in-the-wool Windows users. For those who prefer both platforms on one screen, there are virtualisation tools such as Parallels Desktop, VMware’s Fusion or, more recently, Sun’s xVM VirtualBox, some of which let you run individual Windows applications in a desktop window rather than having to fire up a complete virtual machine.

In industries like publishing, where there’s usually a diverse desktop environment, it must certainly be tempting for IT managers to consider rationalising to a single hardware platform, even if there’s still the hassle of maintaining two operating systems.

The case must be even more compelling in smaller businesses with little or no
support infrastructure to worry about, and perhaps that is where a good chunk of Apple’s growthis actually coming from.

For those currently running pure Windows environments, it may not be quite as compelling an idea, especially for organisations whose support is all managed in-house. I’m sure there are some hidden problems lurking around the Windows-Mac combination, and I would certainly be interested to hear the experience of any readers who have gone down the PC-to-Mac route in their company.

Of course, Apple’s overall market share is still miniscule at a few per cent or so worldwide, and I’m certainly not predicting world domination. But corporate dissatisfaction with Vista and the unknown quantity that is Windows 7 could still play very nicely into the coffers of the residents of 1, Infinite Loop, Cupertino.