MacBook Pro with Parallels for personal use
I know there are a million threads on which laptop is best for personal vs work usage but I’m asking specifically if anyone has used a MacBook, while running parallels for Microsoft Windows, as their primary personal laptop.
I expect to use this laptop primarily for personal use (browsing, streaming, etc) and recruiting, which obviously requires Excel. I generally want to keep all of my devices in the Apple network and think the pro is a superior product overall for my needs (not looking for a janky Lenovo no matter how much you guys glaze it). My plan would be to connect the MacBook to my monitors/keyboard and run parallels whenever I need to use Excel. Has anyone had success with this?
I've tried it before. Honestly, when Macbooks could use Bootcamp, it was much better. With Parallels (and peers), there are some weird issues with keyboard passthrough, that you can fix, as far as I know.
Obviously, not as powerful as running Windows natively, but it's fine if your work requires you to remote into your work desktop.
Reason BootCamp doesn't work anymore is because Apple switched over to their own proprietary CPUs, which are based on ARM technology instead of the industry standard x86 tech. Given most computers used x86, most software wasn't optimized for Windows on ARM and would run poorly unless the developer bothered to make an optimized version. This has now been done for a lot of basic software given that Microsoft and a couple other Windows OEMs did use ARM chips for a while but a ton of more complex software has not yet been optimized, and it's not likely to be done in the near future as it seems everyone who is not Apple has given up on ARM technology
Yup.
Yes - spend a bit of time on Reditt and Paralells forums to get the right setup, etc. You can even leverage a windows keyboard to the virtual machine and/or simply update the mapping as mentioned above for the keyboard. For your use case, and probably 80-90% if not more of them, it will be just fine and comparable to the windows version.
If you can accept dealing with some ghosts in the machine from time to time - you'll be fine. No matter what it's better than the native Mac versions, or the 365 online which I can barely stand on any machine.
I tried it, got like 90% of the way there including setting up the keys to match exactly to the PC shortcuts but was still slightly annoying for me. Decided to go all and listen to the nerds and buy a real desktop PC
I ran Parallels on my M1 Pro Macbook in college and it worked fine, but l was just using Windows for Excel only. I used a Surface Pro external keyboard with it at the time. Later on though I did just buy a Windows computer so I could use it for other things, but if you're just using it for school & recruiting, Parallels should be fine.
Plus Macs have way better webcam resolution for when you're doing Zoom interviews.
Thanks for the thoughtful response. What windows computer did you end up going with?
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