For years the answer to running Windows software on a Mac was one of two things: reboot into a second system installed beside the first, or pay for a virtual machine. The second option was always the more comfortable one and also the one that kept asking for money. That arrangement has ended: the professional edition of this desktop hypervisor is now free for commercial, educational and personal use, and no licence key is asked for at any point.

What that buys is an ordinary but genuinely useful thing. A separate Windows machine, or a Linux machine, or an ARM system, running in a window beside the Mac desktop, isolated from the host and switchable without a restart. The host system is untouched, which is the whole reason the approach exists.

Two chip generations, two implementations

The interesting technical detail is that the program does not work the same way on both generations of Mac hardware. On machines with x86 processors it offers full virtualisation, which means any standard Windows or Linux distribution can run, unchanged and at native instruction speed.

On Macs with the company's own silicon the picture is different: hardware acceleration goes through the system's native virtualisation framework, producing ARM machines that are fast, with one constraint that has to be understood before buying into the idea. The guest must be an ARM build of its operating system. An ARM version of Windows, an ARM Linux distribution – those run well. An x86 build of anything does not, because the processor underneath speaks a different language. This is not a limitation of the software but of the hardware, and any comparison that ignores it is misleading.

Guest systems and virtual hardware

The current release adds official support for several recent Linux distributions and for a current Unix-family system, which is the sort of list that matters more than it looks: an unsupported guest usually works, until an update breaks the display or the network and there is nobody to report it to.

The virtual hardware has moved forward as well. A virtual trusted platform module, an NVMe storage controller and encrypted virtual disks together satisfy the secure boot requirements that modern operating systems now enforce, which is the difference between a machine that installs and one that refuses at the first screen.

Snapshots and the professional tools

A snapshot tree allows branching restore points rather than a single linear history: take one before a critical update, take another after a configuration change, and roll back to either. Linked clones create several machines from one parent disk, sharing the unchanged blocks, which is how a lab of ten test environments fits on a laptop.

The current version adds timestamps recording when each machine was created and last started – a small thing that becomes essential once there are dozens of them – plus remote connection to enterprise virtualisation hosts on ARM architecture. A built-in command line tool reads and edits the configuration file directly, which is what makes automated provisioning possible instead of clicking through a wizard every time.

What was taken away

Two removals deserve to be stated plainly, because a reader who expects them will be disappointed. The interface is now available in only four languages, and Chinese is not among them. The unified mode that let individual guest windows sit directly on the Mac desktop, without the surrounding virtual screen, is also gone.

In exchange, full-window virtualisation and scaling across multiple displays were standardised, which addresses the everyday complaint that the picture looked slightly wrong on a high resolution screen.

Who this is now for

Students who need one Windows program for a course, developers who want a disposable machine to break and rebuild, support staff reproducing a customer's environment, and departments that could never justify a per-seat licence for occasional use. A capable hypervisor becoming free does not make it the right tool for everyone, but it removes the reason most people had for not trying it.