Macs have a thriving ecosystem of software, but some programs still only support Windows. Whether you want to use business software or play Windows PC games, there are many ways to run Windows programs on your Mac.
Some of these methods are similar to the ways you can install Windows software on Linux or run Windows programs on a Chromebook. Virtual machines, dual-booting, the Wine compatibility layer, and remote desktop solutions are all included here.
Virtual Machines
We recommend using a virtual machine program, ideally Parallels or VMWare Fusion, to run Windows applications on a Mac without rebooting. For maximum performance, which is particularly necessary for gaming, we recommend dual-booting Windows with Boot Camp instead.
A virtual machine is one of the best ways to run Windows desktop software. They allow you to install Windows and other operating systems in a window on your Mac desktop. Windows will think it’s running on a real computer, but it’s actually running inside a piece of software on your Mac.
VMware Fusion allows you to run Windows apps on your Mac. Well, technically Windows is running on a virtual machine, a computer emulated in software. Your virtual computer is assigned a portion of the RAM, processor and disk space of your real computer, so it will be slower and have less resources. You can run VMs from Fusion Pro 11 in a VMware Workstation/Player on Windows environment. Make sure the VM(s) are powered off (not suspended) before you copy them from the Mac host.
You don’t have to use your Windows program in the virtual machine window, either—many virtual machine programs allow you to break Windows programs out of your virtual machine window so they can appear on your Mac desktop. However, they’re still running inside the virtual machine in the background.
You’ll need a Windows license to install Windows in a virtual machine. If you already have a product key, you can download Windows installation media for free and install it in a virtual machine program.
RELATED:How to Seamlessly Run Windows Programs on Your Mac with Parallels
Popular virtual machine programs for Mac include Parallels and VMware Fusion. Each of these is a paid program, so you’ll have to buy both a Windows license and a copy of your virtual machine program of choice. You can also use the completely free and open-source VirtualBox for Mac, but its 3D graphics support and Mac operating system integration aren’t as good. Parallels and VMWare Fusion both offer free trials, so you can try all these programs and decide which is best for you.
Note:We don’t often recommend paid software, but in the case of Parallels Desktop, it’s something we use at How-To Geek every single day for testing software and running Windows. The integration with macOS is amazingly well done, and the speed blows away VirtualBox. In the long run, the price is well worth it.
There’s one big downside to virtual machines: 3D graphics performance isn’t amazing, so this isn’t the best way to run Windows games on your Mac. Yes, it can work—especially with older games—but you won’t get the best performance, even in an ideal situation. Many games, especially newer ones, will be unplayable. That’s where the next option comes into play.
Boot Camp
RELATED:How to Install Windows on a Mac With Boot Camp
Apple’s Boot Camp allows you to install Windows alongside macOS on your Mac. Only one operating system can be running at a time, so you’ll have to restart your Mac to switch between macOS and Windows. If you’ve ever dual-booted Linux on your Windows PC, it’s just like that.
Installing Windows as a real operating system on your Mac is the best idea if you want to play Windows games or use demanding applications that need all the performance they can get. When you install Windows on your Mac, you’ll be able to use Windows and Windows applications with the maximum possible performance. Your Mac will perform as well as a Windows PC with the same specifications.
The downside here is that you can’t run macOS applications and Windows applications side-by-side at the same time. If you just want to run a Windows desktop application alongside your Mac applications, a virtual machine will probably be ideal. On the other hand, if you want to play the latest Windows games on your Mac, Boot Camp will be ideal.
As with virtual machines, you’ll need a Windows license to install Windows on your Mac.
Wine
RELATED:How to Run Windows Programs on a Mac With Wine
Wine originated on Linux. It’s a compatibility layer that allows Windows applications to run on other operating systems. Essentially, Wine is an attempt to rewrite the Windows code that applications depend on so they can run on other operating systems. This means that Wine is nowhere near perfect. It won’t run every Windows application, and will have bugs with many of them. The Wine AppDB can give you some idea of which applications are supported, although it focuses on Linux support.
Nevertheless, Wine is one way to try running Windows applications on a Mac. Because it doesn’t require you actually use Windows, you don’t need a Windows license to use Wine. It’s completely free. Just download Wine or WineBottler for macOS and see how well it works for your application.
CrossOver Mac
CodeWeavers’ CrossOver Mac is a paid application that will run Windows programs on Mac. It uses the open-source Wine code to accomplish this, but CrossOver provides a nice graphical interface and focuses on officially supporting popular programs. If an officially supported program doesn’t work, you can contact CodeWeavers and expect them to make it work for you. CodeWeavers contributes their improvements back to the open-source Wine project, so paying for CrossOver Mac also helps the Wine project itself.
CrossOver offers a free trial it you want to try it out first. You can also view a list of which programs run well on CrossOver before buying. While CrossOver focuses on compatibility, it’s still based on Wine, and won’t work with everything.
Most people will probably be happiest going for a virtual machine program and a Windows license. With CrossOver, you don’t need to run a Windows virtual machine—but, if you do run a Windows virtual machine, you’ll be able to run almost any Windows program with less risk of bugs. CrossOver does theoretically allow you to run Windows PC games on a Mac with better performance than you’d get in a virtual machine, but you’ll risk running into bugs and unsupported programs. Boot Camp may still be a better solution for that.
Remote Desktop
RELATED:How to Access Windows Remote Desktop Over the Internet
If you already have a Windows system, you could skip running Windows software on your Mac completely and use remote desktop software to access the Windows machine from your Mac’s desktop. Organizations with business software that runs on Windows can host Windows servers and make their applications available to Macs, Chromebooks, Linux PCs, iPads, Android tablet, and other devices. If you’re just a home user who also has a Windows PC, you could configure that Windows PC for remote access and connect to it whenever you need a Windows application. Bear in mind that this isn’t ideal for visually intensive applications like PC games.
If you’re a Chrome user, you can even use Chrome Remote Desktop to connect to a Windows PC running Chrome from your Mac running Chrome.
All these tricks obviously require more work than simply installing a Windows program on a Windows PC. If you have a Mac, you should focus on using Mac software when possible. Windows programs won’t be as integrated or work as well.
You may have to buy a Windows license for your Mac to get the best compatibility, whether you’re using a virtual machine or installing Windows in Boot Camp. Wine and CrossOver are nice ideas, but they aren’t perfect.
Image Credit: Roman Soto on Flickr
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A Windows VM can be built from an ISO file (pre-existing or downloaded as needed), imported from a connected PC or external drive, or converted from an existing Boot Camp instance. I tried to get the Boot Camp import/conversion to work, but Parallels 13 didn’t recognize my Boot Camp partition, perhaps because I had installed mine on a PCI-based SSD. This seems to be a known uncommon issue and will hopefully be fixed in an upcoming patch. Despite this reminder that Parallels 13 is a very newly released product, it seemed generally reliable and stable during testing. The support forums are active, which is always good to see.
One nice feature of the VM Installation Assistant carried over from version 12 is the ability to quickly install and purchase Windows (7, 8.1 or 10) directly, while also allowing installation of un-activated copies. This allows a developer, for example, to quickly create clean development sandboxes that can be used without having to deal with license activation and that can be activated later if needed without having to rebuild the VM.
Coherence Mode, a feature Parallels added to Parallels Desktop 2.5 back in 2007, has evolved, much like VMware’s Unity Mode or the VirtualBox Seamless Mode, to allow Windows and Mac apps to run side by side seamlessly without displaying the Windows interface. This is certainly of use for Mac users who are not familiar with Windows. Parallels does a nice job of making the application menus looks and feel more Mac-like, and it includes an option that allows the user to switch back out of Coherence mode easily and quickly.
In keeping with Parallels’ focus on usability, there’s a long list of convenience features baked into Desktop 13, including cross-platform TouchID and Touch Bar support for the new MacBook Pros (allowing the creation of custom Touch Bars for Windows apps), 30-plus useful one-click productivity tools for both Windows and Mac bundled as “Parallel Tools,” Mac integration of the Windows People Bar (from the Windows 10 Fall Creators Update), and the ability to access Windows 10’s Cortana from your Mac even if the Parallels VM is not visible. These kinds of things are not by any means must-haves, but taken collectively, they illustrate the care for detail and relative polish of the environment.
What is potentially a bigger deal, however, are the enterprise Mac management and integration tools Parallels has created, including the current version of its extension for Microsoft’s SCCM systems management tool, which significantly expands SCCM’s Mac management capabilities. Plain-vanilla SCCM handles Macs in a somewhat limited form, but Parallels has a plugin that extends those management capabilities in dozens of significant ways, from automated discovery and enrollment to patch management, remote login for technical support, remote wipes and more.
The new Single Application Mode in Desktop for Mac Business Edition allows deployment of Windows apps that hide both Parallels Desktop and the Windows Desktop entirely — kind of like a super-Coherence Mode — enabling deployment of “stealth apps” to end users on Macs without them necessarily aware of Windows at all. There is also a new mass deployment package for large-scale provisioning. Taken as a whole, the management features Parallels offers add significant value to its product line.
The basic Parallels 13 Desktop product (listed as “for home and student use”) retails for $79.99. The Pro product is $99/user/year, on a subscription model (including free upgrades), and adds a number of useful features for developers, plus the ability to scale past 8GB vRAM up to 128GB, and to go from 4 to 32 vCPUs. Parallels 13 Desktop Business Edition is currently the same price as the Pro package and includes everything it does, plus some business-oriented features for administration and management, such as mass deployment options and volume license keys.
VMware Fusion (8.5.8)
VMware’s Fusion is another product with a long history in the Mac virtualization space, but for VMware, Macs are one small part of a much larger enterprise picture. VMware was the first company to successfully create products offering x86 virtualization, and literally (and virtually) sets the standards in many cases for hypervisor architectures and virtualization technology.
Fusion first appeared on the market 10 years ago, and since then, Fusion and Parallels have tended to leapfrog each other with new releases. At the time of publication, VMware has announced, but not yet released, its new version, 10. For this review, we looked at the current version, 8 (VMware is skipping version 9), but we’ll soon have a follow-up review of Fusion 10, which looks to have a number of very solid enhancements for the enterprise market.
The list of available supported VMs for Fusion goes far beyond Windows and includes 95 different OS options (the full list can be found here). For running Windows on Mac, your options under VMware Fusion go all the way back to Windows 3.1 and right up to Windows Server 2016 and Windows 10. VMware Fusion has full compatibility with VMs created with the other VMware products as well; there can be significant systems management benefits to using Fusion in conjunction with other VMware products already in use.
In the lab, the “easy install” option for Windows 10 worked without a hitch — quick and simple, installing from a Windows 10 x64 ISO file saved locally on my Mac (though a DVD or USB-drive ISO work just as well). Cloning my existing Boot Camp partition into a new VM also seemed to work, and did in fact boot up easily, but there was a persistent driver-incompatibility error preventing network connectivity that I did not have time to resolve. It’s an area I’ll investigate further, but in general, you’re probably better off starting with a clean install of Windows and/or developing standardized Windows VMs to distribute.
The Unity option is similar to Parallels’ Coherence view, where a Windows app can be presented inside the macOS desktop as what appears to be a stand-alone application, side by side with macOS app windows. One small but interesting difference is that with Coherence, moving virtualized windows is fairly smooth and seamless, but Unity windows were sometimes visually jerky and at times briefly showed fragments of the Windows desktop around the edges as it moved. Functionally, both are totally usable, but it is one of the areas where Parallels seems to have a bit of an edge on polish.
The current shipping price for Fusion 8.5 (including free upgrade to Fusion 10) is $79.99 per Standard and $159.99 per Pro license, the latter of which includes 18 months of email support. Volume purchases (10-plus licenses) have other support options (business hours and 24/7) available for additional purchase.