And that opened up possibilities of running Windows and other PC operating systems and software at something like full speed on a Mac. That meant that on a hardware level, Macs weren’t all that different than the PCs of that era. Then in 2006, Apple released its first Intel CPU-powered Macs. Emulation software like VirtualPC could be used to, for instance, run the Windows of the day on, say, a 1999 iMac, but it ran – at best – slowly, as each software instruction had to be painfully translated by the emulator from Intel CPU code into an equivalent PowerPC instruction. Being based on different processor families meant that making software that ran on both PCs and Macs was difficult. It used to be that Windows PCs ran on Intel (or Intel-style) processors – descendants of the Intel 8088 CPU that powered 1981’s original IBM PC – and Macs ran on totally different hardware – initially on CPUs descended from the Motorola 68000 used by the original 1984 Macintosh and later on IBM/Motorola PowerPC processors. But there are lots of games that won’t work that way.įace it – for many Mac users there are times when it would be handy to be able to run something in Windows. Then there are gamers – yes, there are games for Mac (and for iOS), and platforms like Steam make many games available cross-platform. Web designers will need to see how their page designers are going to look when running in Windows browsers. Small businesses needing accounting software remain poorly served if they’re running Macs, for instance – especially if their accountant wants them to produce data that can be read by Quickbooks or Sage Accounting. But with virtualization and other technologies, we’re a little bit closer than would otherwise be the case.īut don’t I already have everything I need or want on my Mac? Like the peaceful utopia in John Lennon’s Imagine, we’re not there yet. Wouldn’t that be great? Read and edit old word processor files – MacWord, anyone? WordStar? Run PC games on your Mac, Super Nintendo games on your Windows PC? But, if you need a great virtualization option, it's my current pick.Imagine if you could seamlessly open any document and run any program on your computer. The downside is that if you're on a laptop battery, Parallels can drain it pretty quickly. Parallels also offers remote access service called Access (it's subscription-based and optional), which makes it easy to access your virtual machine from anywhere. 3D graphics run more slowly than Boot Camp due to virtualization - after all, when your Mac is booted into a Windows Boot Camp partition, it is, for all intents and purposes, a Windows PC. Boot times are less and 3D graphics run faster. Having said that, I've found that Parallels Desktop 10 works faster on my Mac (a 2013 15-inch Retina MacBook Pro) than VMWare Fusion 7 does. They're always battling for dominance in the Mac virtualization software market. So in many ways, Parallels Desktop and VMWare Fusion play an arm-wrestling game with each other. That makes it easy to open apps and documents and launch Windows without creating a lot of disruption (or even a lot of open extra windows) on your Mac. Both offer advanced integration with the Mac environment. How to install Windows 10 on your Mac without spending a dimeīoth Parallels Desktop and VMWare Fusion make it very easy for you to set up a new virtual machine and configure it to run Windows and Windows apps optimally.
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