To give you an idea of what I mean, you get lots more touchpad gestures under OS X than Windows 10. It should be noted that the Apple drivers and software do not reveal anywhere near the same level of customisation as they do in OS X. Or you can press the Option/Alt key on your Mac keyboard right after the device powers on or reboots. If you want to switch back to OS X, you can easily do so by opening Boot Camp in Windows 10 and selecting the option to boot to OS X. Like I mentioned earlier, there are some niggles here and there but, once everything is set up as you want, you'd be hard-pressed to tell the difference between your Mac and a traditional PC. In my experience with Windows 10 installed via Boot Camp on my late-2013 MacBook Air I have had no noteworthy issues to speak of. Boot Camp presents an understandable advantage when used on an entry-level Mac with a slower processor and not a lot of RAM, because the device will only have to run a single operating system and not two at once. Since you are not using virtualisation, your Mac will perform under Windows 10 just like a similar desktop or laptop. It will give you the best performance, and a PC-like experience, with all the benefits and drawbacks that come with it. I'll start with Boot Camp, because it is what every OS X user has easy access to.īoot Camp is best at one thing, and that is allowing you to run Windows 10 at full speed on a Mac. Now that you know Boot Camp and Parallels' features, let's talk about benefits. When this mode is enabled, you get the best of both worlds: the ability to experience OS X in all its glory while getting to keep all your favourite Windows programs close. The latter, called Coherence mode, is what makes Parallels special.

Chose it from the list of available software, and it will shortly appear on the screen like an OS X app. It can let you run Windows 10 in a typical virtual machine, but it can also allow you to run only the Windows program that you want. So, for all intents and purposes, you can look at this article as a comparison between Boot Camp, in its OS X 10.11 El Capitan form, and Parallels 11.īut why Parallels? I have mentioned that it is extremely versatile, and that is because Parallels has a dual personality. But, before we dive into it, a quick note: the virtualisation software has added support for Windows 10 in its 11th iteration, which is the latest available at the time of writing this article. You may notice some kinks here and there, depending on how polished the drivers are and whether Windows 10 supports all the features that the Mac offers, but, for the most part, it will all work as expected.

And since traditional PCs and more-recent Macs are very similar hardware-wise, Windows 10 will run on a Mac pretty much like it would on a, say, Dell or HP laptop or custom-made desktop.

Parallels vs bootcamp