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I have a friend that wants to buy a Mac Book Pro and he has some windows applications that he needs to run. He doesn't want to buy the applications again.

Can he run the Windows applications on his MacBook Pro? What ways to accomplish this are available?

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4 Answers 4

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You have three choices. They all come with pros and cons

Run a Virtual Machine

You have VMWare Fusion and Parallels Desktop in the commercial space to chose from when it comes to virtualization software. And if you're comfortable tweaking and fiddling you can use VirtualBox for free.

Pros:

  • Near native speeds for your applications
  • Your OS X-based data can be accessed from your Windows programs
  • Can pick between running them in a full Windows desktop-in-a-Window or in integrated mode where the Window apps appear as windowed apps right in your OS X desktop
  • Decent support in the commercial offerings at least for graphics acceleration so you can run some graphics intensive programs
  • You get a bunch of neat things with virtual machines including the ability to pause applications mid-run and snapshot the state of your virtual machine

Cons:

  • You have to buy a copy of the Windows operating system
  • The Windows OS installation will take up a lot of space on your hard drive, plus the Windows application space
  • If your Mac is older, doesn't have much RAM, the VM approach can drag down your system a bit but most, if not all, new Macs can handle VM hosting duties without much of any issue

Run Wine

Wine is a translation layer for Windows applications. It's a bit like a virtual machine but doesn't require the Windows OS. It sits between the Windows application and OS X and makes the application think it's running on Windows by translating all the Windows calls its making to OS X calls.

There are two choices of know of here. The free WineBottler and the paid-for CrossOver Mac from CodeWeavers.

Some commercial software is delivered for OS X this way -- I know The Sims 3 game that my wife likes to play on her MacBook Pro is actually the Windows version of the game running under the Wine emulator.

Pros:

  • You don't need to buy a copy of Windows
  • Your OS X-based data can be accessed from your Window programs

Cons:

  • Application support under Wine can be hit-and-miss. Some apps work well, some don't. Check at http://appdb.winehq.org/ to see if your applications are on the list of tested, supported applications if you're going to try WineBottler. CodeWeavers keeps their own list.
  • Because the Windows applications think they're running on Windows, and not everything Windows does translates perfectly to OS X, some applications can behave erratically.

Run Windows Native with BootCamp

Windows can actually be installed your Apple hardware directly and usually runs just fine. Apple even provides a utility called BootCamp that lets you keep a Windows and OS X installation available to your Mac and pick which OS to boot in to when you start up your machine.

Pros:

  • That's the fastest you can get for Windows apps on Apple hardware. It's the OS running on bare metal. If you need every last little bit of performance for your applications, this will be your best bet.
  • Your Windows partition stays separate from your OS X partition so changes to one rarely impact the other

Cons:

  • You have to buy a copy of the Windows operating system
  • Moving data between the Windows side to the OS X side is hard and in some cases impossible, for the most part the OS'es and their programs are completely silo'ed
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  • Bootcamp can be used in combination with a virtual machine (like Parallel) and this gives the best of both worlds.
    – CousinCocaine
    Jun 19, 2014 at 9:37
  • For Smaller Apps & Games, Wine is perfect for me. For more "pure native windows stuff" (for example office) we use Parallels Desktop at work. If it is more Professional Software (for example Adobe Ps/Ae/Pr or similar) then I would go with BootCamp.
    – rwenz3l
    Jun 19, 2014 at 10:38
  • With "more Professional Software" I think you mean more hardware dependent.
    – CousinCocaine
    Jun 22, 2014 at 7:23
  • Should I worry about malware using Wine? is it sandboxed?
    – rraallvv
    Jan 13, 2015 at 22:39
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    @rraallvv it is not as secure as running in a virtual machine. The wine layer translates Windows system calls to OS X calls and, while it doesn't circumvent standard OS X privilege escalation policies, it certainly doesn't insulate your system in any particular way from attempted malicious behaviour.
    – Ian C.
    Jan 13, 2015 at 23:22
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You can install Windows Applications on your Mac in 3 ways.

  1. Use Bootcamp to install Windows on your Mac. Requires a legal copy of Windows. Also the fastest, but you can't run Mac Applications at the same time
  2. Install a Virtual Machine, such as Parallels or VirtualBox. Performance will suffer.
  3. Use Wine to run Windows Applications. Performance will suffer

The Answer to your Question:

Yes, VM's are a good way to run Windows Applications, however they are not foolproof. Mac's, while certainly more optimized, are not more powerful than a PC. These are because they are PC's; just ones designed by apple. You would be running an entire PC in a PC, which means it will greatly affect performance. However, if it's something low performance, a VM might just work! Ask your friend to attempt to find (hopefully free) alternatives to whatever software he has licensed for Mac OS X

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  • For all practical purposes, assuming the host has good hardware, there is zero effect on CPU, RAM, and disk performance because of a virtual machine. It is not true that performance has to be greatly affected.
    – Asclepius
    Feb 28, 2014 at 19:20
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Nearly any Windows app can be made to run on Mac hardware, running OS X, even graphically intensive games, albeit with a loss in performance (to some degree or other), just by wrapping the application in a Wineskin... Now I had heard about this over a couple of years, but, after my experience of using Wine on Linux in the early 2000's, I was always put off my what I imagined would be a right pain to configure, terrible performance and just a general nightmare. How wrong I turned out to be. About two months ago I ended up having to fix a game app to run OS X, found some instructions, followed them and since then I have been wineskin-ing loads of Windows only apps (Multimeter logging software, Comms software, etc).

Wineskin MacOS icon

Download Wineskin Winery, and follow the steps below:

  1. Update the wrapper
  2. Install a wineskin engine
  3. Create a wrapper
  4. Configure your wrapper
  5. Install and run your software
  6. How to Get Back to the Wrapper Configuration Page

These steps were taken from How to Run Your Favorite Windows Programs on OS X with Wineskin. There is an alternative method, which I employ, which comes from the youtube video that I mention below, How To Fix Grand Theft Auto SanAndreas Not Starting *Mac:

  1. Open the Wineskin winery app and update the wrapper - click on the Update button.
  2. Install a wineskin engine - click the + beneath the list area of the engines, choose the latest one and click Download and Install
  3. Create a new wrapper - name it in the subsequent dialog, "Please choose a name for this wrapper", click OK.
  4. The subsequent dialogs (Do you want to install Mono, .NET, etc.) you can click Cancel, if you know that you don't need them, otherwise there is no hard in clicking Install
  5. On the OSX dialog, "Do you want the app to accept incoming Network connections" - click Deny if your app needs no network access, else click Allow.
    1. When it has finally finished creating the Wrapper (it can take a while), click on View wrapper in Finder
  6. Right click and select Show Package Contents
  7. Open the alias drive_c. This should reveal three directories (Users, Program Files and windows)

  8. Now on the PC/Windows machine, where your Windows application resides, open up the C:\Program Files\ directory and copy the directory that contains your installed app to the mac (via network, USB drive or what have you). So if the path is

    C:\Program Files\RandomCorp\NiceApp\NiceApp.exe

then you want to copy the RandomCorp directory.

  1. Once you have copied the RandomCorp directory to your Mac, drag it to the Program Files directory in the drive_c in the Wineskin wrapper. You can now close the window to the package contents.
  2. Open the wrapper (double click the icon). As it is not yet configured, a double opens up. In the resulting Wineskin dialog, click Advanced, click Browse, navigate to the RandomCorp\NiceApp directory, locate the NiceApp.exe and click Choose.
  3. Click Test Run to test it.
  4. The application should run.
  5. You can now close it.
  6. Test Run logs - if you had no problems click Cancel else click View to see what went wrong.
  7. You can now close the Advanced dialog.
  8. You can now run the app by doubling clicking the Wrapper icon.

There are a number of video tutorials out there, on youtube, of varying quality. I, myself, followed one called "How To Fix Grand Theft Auto SanAndreas Not Starting *Mac" (The mis-spelling of San Andreas is a direct quote). Admittedly it does not have the best audio, nor is the verbal explanation particularly clear, but the steps in the video itself are straight forward enough - it is the video that I followed and learnt with, when I had to resort to using Wineskin for the first time.

Hope this helps.

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Have you heard of software called Parallels Desktop? http://parallels.com It has some great features; not just not having to reboot your computer every time you switch from to Mac to Windows or vice versa but also being able to use so many programs with speed and efficiency, being able to access your document created in Windows from your Mac without any hassle and also sync Mac browsers such as Safari bookmarks with Windows browser bookmarks.

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