The Boot Camp Assistant app sets aside a portion of your hard drive to install Windows. You’ll also need at least 16-20GB of hard drive space, and that’s before you start installing applications and saving files. And it might catch a few of them with the recently launched Windows 365, which lets you stream Windows via a web browser (it’s currently businesses only, mind).īut for users who liked to switch between Windows and macOS on their Macs, this looming divorce is going to be unpleasant. Boot Camp Boot Camp is a free utility that comes with your Mac that allows you to run Windows alongside macOS. However, running a virtual machine alongside macOS needs lots of memory (at least 8GB in total, and more if you want to run more than one virtual machine) and at least two processor cores. For Microsoft, which has since launched its own Surface hardware range, it’s really not bothered about losing a relatively small contingent of Mac users. Apple would obviously prefer customers to stick with macOS and it only provided Boot Camp in the first place to tempt ardent Windows fans into the Mac camp. You don’t get the sense that either Apple or Microsoft executives will lose any sleep over this. Windows 10 is due to be supported until 2025, which gives Windows on Mac fans a little breathing space, but with Apple focusing all its manufacturing efforts on its own silicon rather than Intel’s, it’s going to become harder and harder to find Mac hardware to run Windows natively in the years to come. Apple and Microsoft have remained stubbornly tight-lipped on support for Windows 11 in Boot Camp, but unless Apple finds some way to fake the TPM chip in the same way Parallels does, you simply won’t be able to install Windows 11 in Boot Camp. Certainly, if you plan to play 3D games or run other demanding applications, Boot Camp offers far superior performance than a virtual machine.Īlas, however, it seems Boot Camp is being slowly shuttered.
Parallels Desktop is, without doubt, one of the most popular virtual machine software among Mac users. The following screenshot shows how Oracle VM VirtualBox, installed on an Apple Mac OS X computer, is running Windows Server 2016 in a virtual machine window. Follow along as we look at the 5 great virtualization software that you can use in 2022.
Parallels Desktop is good, but for raw performance many people prefer to install Windows in Boot Camp, which has direct access to the Mac hardware. Note that in both instances, you will still need to purchase a Windows license.