Apple finally released their much awaited Windows 7 drivers today. They were due to ship by the end of 2009; when they slipped past that deadline, we were told “they will ship when they are done.” While I know that when 99.44% of the industry says such things that they will be burned alive, Apple’s community says “Aw, gee, thanks! When you tell us it’s ready, we know it will Just Work.” I know that. I don’t have a big problem with that, however annoying it is, but my bigger problem is about “How long do I wait and what do I do in the meantime?”

On top of that, the Windows 7 64-bit installer simply doesn’t work.

I spent hours on this tonight and guess what: it Just Doesn’t Work.

I put Windows 7 64-bit on my Boot Camp partition on my MacBook Air in December. I knew that the x64 Vista drivers would work from the 10.6 disc if I skipped the installer and went for the MSI directly. When the new drivers came out I said “Well, if they are officially supporting Windows 7 x64, I should uninstall all of the drivers” because that makes sense to me. I did that and ran the Boot Camp 3.1 installer: nothing happened.

After checking the forums, I saw that it’s an upgrade thing. Fine. I put Boot Camp 3.0 back on the box and attempted to run the upgrader: nothing happened.

I cracked open the downloaded EXE, since it was a self-extracting RAR, and took a look: one EXE, one MSP, and one CAB… I try running the EXE: nothing happened.

So I went ahead and tried the MSP… got promped with a “Repair/Uninstall” option. Uwahhhh. That’s something that happened. I said Repair. This went through an install process – while it was installing, I looked at the temp folder: it was installing Vista versions of the drivers. That makes some sense since I know it had installed Vista versions with Boot Camp 3.0. After it was done and a reboot, Boot Camp told me it was running 3.1. Whoo! A valid upgrade!

And then I did some looking… there were over 20 driver packages installed… most of them from 2007 and 2008. Uh… that’s old. I tried looking for new features – nothing. I mean, I didn’t expect all of my dream list to make it, but something – anything would have been good. Like auto-diming the screen on ambient light, diming the keyboard, three and four finger support for the Trackpad… anything would have been nice.

That made me wonder: maybe I got the older Vista drivers after all? Then I thought some more and said “what a damned minute!” Apple tells us that this update to Boot Camp will enable people to install Windows 7 x64. But you can’t get a clean/stand alone install of Boot Camp 3.1 at anytime …and you can’t install Boot Camp 3.0 to Windows 7 x64. So how in the hell am I supposed to apply a patch to a piece of software that I can’t install in the first place?

Yeah, right, it all Just Works. And before the Apple Fanboys start blathering on about “Just use OSX” or “This is Windows fault” let me end that right now: Apple advertises that this is supposed to work and it doesn’t. They made the drivers – it’s not Windows fault if they can’t make a working product on another OS. If they want to support it they should ship working code and at a level that pleases their customers. I will not take “Just don’t do that” or “Use this other thing instead” as a solution here. If I want to drive my MINI somewhere and it doesn’t run right, taking a bus or a taxi doesn’t fix the problem – it works around it.

Oh, and since when does silent failure make for a good user experience? I’ve noticed the iPhone started this trend of “Oh, if an application crashes, just return to the home screen as if nothing happened.” It’s not the iPhone’s fault that the application crashed – much like it’s not Windows fault that Apple’s installer/driver support sucks – but I don’t understand how the lack of an error message helps anyone in the food chain, be it clueless end user, savvy end user or developer…

My guess is that I’m annoyed with this enough that I’ll just repave the damned box with Windows 7 x86 – maybe that’ll help.