We're often asked if it's possible to run SolidWorks on my Mac. If you're wondering if it is possible, we have good news and bad news. The good news is that it is possible. The bad news is that it isn't officially supported by SolidWorks and comes with some limitations, SOLIDWORKS won't run directly on Mac OS. However, we have several customers successfully using SolidWorks via parallels, which allows windows to run on their Mac. Once parallels is set up, it allows you to start your machine on Mac OS, and then within the parallel software, you can run windows within a virtual session. This can be very convenient as you're essentially running both operating systems at once. However, it requires a lot of computing power before any of the programs have started. Parallels will give you the ability to specify how many cores and how much Ram is devoted to windows tasks, which means so long as you have suitable Mac specs, you can meet the SolidWorks system requirements in these areas. The recent Macs with CPUs from ARM. The process of installing SolidWorks file parallels is straightforward, provided that both SolidWorks, Cam and Electrical are disabled. Since these rely on Microsoft components not supported on the ARM version of windows SolidWorks, visualize may also need to be excluded, since it requires AVX2 which Mac doesn't currently support. Where parallels really has issues is in graphics performance. In order for SolidWorks to perform at its best, it needs to be running on a computer with an approved graphics card. These are the Nvidia professional, AMD Radeon Pro, and Intel Arc Pro ranges. You can find a full list on the SolidWorks website if you intend to use SolidWorks. Visualize. We highly recommend an Nvidia professional card over any others. Very few Macs have the supported cards. And no currently sold Macs come with them without a supported card. Some features, such as real view graphics and enhanced graphics performance will be unavailable and you will run into performance limitations when working with assemblies or complex parts. Even if your Mac does have supported graphics card, there's still no guarantee of performance as parallels will run a virtual graphics card driver, which may cause its own issues, and there's currently no way to work around it. Within parallels, we have seen some workarounds to improve graphics by making registry changes. However, these are not officially supported and can cause major issues within SolidWorks and your computer as a whole. We suggest that these are only attempted if you're already familiar with making changes to the registry. Fundamentally, for the fastest and most stable SolidWorks experience, we always recommend using a windows PC. If you're interested in purchasing or learning more about hardware for SolidWorks, then check out our hardware recommendations from the link in the video description or email hardware@SolidSolutions.co.uk For more information on running parallels and the SolidWorks system requirements, click the link in the video description to view the blogs on our website.