If you’re comfortable setting it up yourself and don’t need help, and you’re not bothered about features like Sidecar support or other extras, then Virtual Box could be a good choice for you. You also don’t get the kind of support or help during set-up that you do with those apps. That means it's free to use for individuals, but it also means that it’s much less polished than either Parallels Desktop or VMWare Fusion. Reason to use: You can run more types of operating systems other than Windows. The latest version of Fusion supports Dark Mode and Sidecar, as well as the MacBook Pro’s Touch Bar. The third option, which Parallels Desktop also shares, allows you to run individual Windows apps alongside Mac apps while keeping Windows itself hidden. Or you can run it in a window so that the whole Windows interface runs like a Mac app. You can run it full-screen so that your Mac looks like a Windows PC. VMWare Fusion doesn’t get updated as often as Parallels Desktop. Reason to use: Works fast, no need to reboot. It’s also available in several different versions which support different numbers of users. Parallels is updated every year and the current update runs on Big Sur, even though Apple has made lots of changes under the hood on Big Sur to support Apple Silicon-based Macs. Its main benefit is that it is easy to set up and use and allows you to easily share files and hardware resources like a printer between Mac and Windows. And like the other tools here, you can install not just Windows, but almost any OS you like. This is one of the most popular ways to run Windows on a Mac. Reason to use: It’s pre-installed on your Mac. However, you need to reboot your Mac every time you want to switch between Mac and Windows. In Boot Camp, you don’t run Windows on top of macOS, so it uses less RAM and fewer processor cycles than other solutions. Every Intel Mac ships with Boot Camp which allows you to partition your startup disk and install Windows on the Boot Camp partition.īoot Camp’s main advantage, other than cost, is speed. If you need a solution that doesn’t cost anything other than the license for Windows, this is it. For our purposes, emulation and virtualisation amount to the same thing.

But that’s a technical distinction we don’t need to worry about too much. Software that allows you to install Windows is now more accurately referred to as virtualization software rather than emulation. Now that the Mac is based on Intel hardware (at least until the whole range moves to Apple Silicon), it’s much less of a challenge to run Windows. Software had to emulate the Intel hardware in a PC in order to install the software. In those days, because of the Mac’s PowerPC hardware, running Windows was much more complicated than it is now. The term emulation goes back to the days before the Mac started using Intel processors.

Thanks to some neat software tools, you can run Windows on your Mac and there are several different options for doing it. Some people need Windows for gaming or they need a specific professional app that is old and runs only on PC. Or you can run Windows on your Mac using a tool, like BootCamp. You can keep a Windows PC handy for the occasions when you need to access Windows. And to do that, you have a couple of choices. No matter how much you love your Mac, there are times when we all need to occasionally run Windows. But to help you do it all by yourself, we’ve gathered our best ideas and solutions below.įeatures described in this article refer to the MacPaw site version of CleanMyMac X. So here's a tip for you: Download CleanMyMac to quickly solve some of the issues mentioned in this article.

Mac emulator program