Parallels Desktop 26

Run Windows and more on your Mac with ease

- Hollin Jones

> Standard edition £154.99 or £58.49/year; Pro edition £64.99/year (subscription only) > FROM parallels.​com > NEEDS macOS 10.14.6 or later

Before the iPhone, Apple was far less well known around the world than it is now. Outside of the creative industries most people used Windows PCs and that meant there were quite a few software products that simply did not exist for the Mac. Running Windows without needing a PC has long been something that has been useful for developers, gamers and those who like both platforms. When Apple transitioned to using Intel processors it created Boot Camp which let you run Windows natively but you were either booted into one OS or the other.

Emulators and virtualisation packages like Parallels Desktop were created to allow you the best of both worlds - running Windows in a window while running macOS on your Mac. Although Apple has moved again this time to its own silicon, Parallels runs on all Macs from recent years including the M-series chips. The only caveat is that M-series models support recent versions of Windows, Linux and a few others while Intel Macs also support older versions of a wider range of esoteric OSes - this is because of fundamentally different CPU architectures.