![]() The advantage is that you can still make use of Mac software – check your email in Apple Mail, for instance – while running software in Windows or Linux. When you do this, Mac OS X is still running in the background, which is both an advantage and a disadvantage. Installing virtualization software, using it to create “virtual machines” and installing the PC operating system(s) of your choice in the virtual machines.The disadvantage – while you’re running Windows you have no access to your Mac software. This is probably the best way to run resource-heavy Windows games on your Mac. The big advantage of Boot Camp – when you boot a Mac into Windows this way, it’s able to make use of all the system memory and all the Mac’s processor power, running at full speed. Note that Boot Camp only supports recent Windows versions and doesn’t support non-Windows PC operating systems at all. Booting directly to Windows ( et al) – at first a hacker initiative, Apple released its Boot Camp utility, making it straightforward for Mac owners to partition their Mac’s hard drive and install a version of Windows into the freed-up space.This so-called Hackintoshing is a different story).įairly quickly after the release of the first Intel-powered Macs, three different strategies for running PC (usually but not necessarily Windows) software on Macs evolved: (It also opened up the possibility of running Mac OS X and Mac software on non-Apple hardware. 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? Imagine if you could seamlessly open any document and run any program on your computer. ![]()
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