Apple Adds Windows 10 Support to Boot Camp

Apple now supports dual-booting newer Macs with Windows 10 using a technology called Boot Camp. As with previous versions of this software, doing so incurs numerous performance and efficiency trade-offs, and in my own testing I’ve found virtualization solutions like Parallels Workstation to work better in some cases.

Still, the enduring popularity of dual-booting Windows on Macs says something about the state of that market. And with official Windows 10 support, Windows fans shouldn’t have as many hoops to jump through as before, though I never had any issues installing Windows 10 on Boot Camp previously, as the system so closely resembles Windows 8.1.

To install Windows 10 on your Mac with Boot Camp, you need to be running Mac OS X “Yosemite” or newer, and you need the latest Boot Camp version (6), which you can get from the Mac App Store.

You also need a compatible Mac. These include:

MacBook Pro

MacBook Pro with Retina display (13-inch, Late-2012 to Early-2015)
MacBook Pro with Retina display (15-inch, Mid-2012 to Mid-2015)
MacBook Pro (13-inch, Mid-2012)
MacBook Pro (15-inch, Mid-2012)

MacBook Air

MacBook Air (11-inch, Mid-2012 to Early-2015)
MacBook Air (13-inch, Mid-2012 to Early-2015)

MacBook

MacBook with Retina display (12-inch, Early-2015)

iMac

iMac (Retina 5k, 27-inch, Late-2014 to Mid-2015)
iMac (21.5-inch, Late-2012 to Mid-2014)
iMac (27-inch, Late-2012 to Late-2013)

Mac mini

Mac mini (Late-2014)
Mac mini Server (Late-2012)
Mac mini (Late-2012)

Mac Pro

Mac Pro (Late-2013)

And you will of course need a Windows 10 ISO file in either 32-bit or 64-bit form, which you can obtain from the Windows web site. (I explained this in Get Windows 10 on ISO.) You will also need a Windows 10 product key, unless you intend to just trial the software for 30 days. If you’re upgrading, you can just do this in-place from within Windows 10, as you would with any other PC.

From there it’s just a simple matter of running Boot Camp (which you can find with Spotlight, a sort of Start search-like feature that works really well). The wizard-like application will prompt you to divvy up the Mac’s storage between Windows and Mac OS X, and will download Apple’s Boot Camp drivers for Windows, which provide generally lackluster performance and utility but do in fact “work.” (The touchpad driver is notably terrible, and the keyboard is weird. If you have a hybrid “Fusion” drive in your Mac, Windows can only use the slower HDD part. Macs with dual-graphics cards can only use the dedicated graphics card in Windows. And so on.)

I’ll write more about Windows 10 on Mac here on Thurrott.com and in Windows 10 Field Guide when I get home from France.