For my proof-of-concept I chose the Parallels Desktop Lite incarnation found in the OSX App Store since my only interest was seeing if I could get the latest Windows 10 Insider build running on my Mac in a window. There are a number of varieties of the Parallels product available. I selected one of the commercial offerings – Parallels. At present, this type of functionality is not in OSX and so a third party application is needed. Windows users (in the Pro editions since Windows 8) have had Hyper-V technology built into the OS to allow virtual machines to be run on the desktop, which is a boon to the developer. It works and, perhaps most importantly, is free (other than the cost of the Windows licence) but isn’t particularly convenient to use. Switching between environments requires a restart. If all goes well, at the end of the Bootcamp process your Mac will be in the position where it can boot into OSX or Windows.

In my case, I downloaded the latest Windows 10 ISO from Microsoft and let Bootcamp make an image for me on a USB memory stick (I wouldn’t recommend trying it on anything less than a 32gb drive). An unkind person might wonder if Apple have deliberately made the experience an unpleasant one.Īs well as Bootcamp, you need a Windows 10 image. Apple’s support forum includes step by step instructions, but even following these can produce some unexpected results: one attempt left my Mac so badly broken that I was forced to wipe and reinstall. It is, without doubt, one of the most unintuitive pieces of software found in the OSX suite, and well hidden within the utilities folder. The Bootcamp utility included with the current OSX (10.12 Sierra) represents the current state of the art, containing a wizard to install Windows and all the drivers required by Windows for the Mac hardware. This utility, known as Bootcamp, was then included as part of OSX 10.5 and by the time it had reached v2, left its beta status behind. In 2006, Apple introduced an unsupported utility to allow a Mac disk to be partitioned to allow the hardware to boot into Windows rather than OSX. Indeed, for a good few years, the industry faced the irony that Apple made the best Windows laptops. Macs are (at time of writing) exclusively Intel-based PC’s, which makes them ideal targets for a Windows installation. Anyone who has received something shiny with an Apple logo on it over the festive season and realised that the majority of their day to day applications aren’t available may find this of interest. Since I have a Mac connected to a large screen (my Dell XPS spends much of its time in my bag, sleeping soundly in the way that the Surface Pro doesn’t) I was keen to check out my options for running Windows on a Mac.

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