Mac Boot Camp to support Windows 7 by year's end

Apple today promised to update its Boot Camp partitioning tool to support Windows 7 Home Premium, Professional, and Ultimate before the end of the year.

In a support article posted to Apple's site today, it says the Boot Camp upgrade will be brought to most Intel-based Macs running OS X Snow Leopard. The sole exception at this point is the 2006 line, where Windows 7 will not be supported by the 17" and 20" iMac, 15" and 17" Macbook Pro and 2.66GHz or 3GHz Mac Pro. These units represent the first generation of Intel-based Macs, and represent a transitional period in the Mac architecture.

Users of these particular models who wish to install Windows 7 will have to do so on a virtual machine through software such as Parallels 4.0 or the soon-to-be-launched VMware Fusion 3.0. Parallels 4.0 has supported Windows 7 in its earlier forms for about six months.

Boot Camp currently only supports Windows XP and Vista in its official documentation, but a number of users claim to have already installed Windows 7 with no problem.