I've used Parallels since 2006 and I despise the upgrade schedule they force on us - they don't allow older versions of the software to support newer versions of OSX for very long. Although there are various ways of running Windows on a Mac, the best way to run Windows on an M1 Mac is with Parallels. That will setup your network card, display, and other Apple-centric.
Once your windows installation is complete, remember to navigate into file explorer and install the Boot Camp drivers for your machine. The engine is required to make the Windows applications. Click the + button to download and install the latest engine. On the first run, there won’t be any engine showing up in the list. Extract the file and move the Wineskin app to your Applications folder. If running this one app side-by-side in OSX is valuable, constantly restarting your computer to log into and out of Windows is not an acceptable option, performance is a non-factor, and you have the cash to spend, go Emulator.Īnd between Parallels and Fusion (as a long time user of Parallels), go Fusion. Follow the prompts like you normally would and youll be able to run Windows 10 natively on your Mac. The latest version as of this post is 2.5.12. That may seem like a lot of steps, but it doesn’t take all that long to install Windows on a Mac. Warning: All data, including software and files, stored on the Windows partition will be deleted, so make the backup copies first.
If you won't be running this program all the time, don't need to have it running along side your OSX apps, and/or the performance of the app is important, or you'd rather not have to spend ~$80 on top of the cost of Windows just for one app, go Boot Camp. The Boot Camp Assistant will automatically remove Windows from your Mac. Also, how much of a hassle will it be to have to boot out of OSX and into Windows and then back everytime? If it is only one program, how important is performance? Emulators will not perform as well as running Windows natively through Boot Camp.
Your options are whether to run Windows natively (Boot Camp) or to emulate (Parallels / Fusion) Running Windows on a Mac effectively isolates the rest of your Mac from any potential problems with viruses, malware or adware.