How to run Windows 10 on your Mac for free

“In the summer of 2014, Apple offered enrollees in its AppleSeed program a chance to try out the public beta of OS X Yosemite long before its actual release,” Peter Cohen reports for iMore.

“Now, you can do the same thing for Microsoft’s forthcoming release of Windows 10,” Cohen reports. “What’s more, it’s almost trivial to install on the Mac, and you don’t need to spend a dime doing it.”

“Before you get Windows on your Mac, you have to decide how you want to run it: virtually within OS X, or on a separate hard drive partition using Boot Camp,” Cohen reports. “Using software provided by Apple, you can turn your Mac into a dual-booting computer capable of running Windows or OS X natively.”

Read more in the full article here.

24 Comments

  1. So you can run a beta for “free” until it is released … at which time it stops working and you have to buy a license …

    When did the definition of “free” change?

    1. You can actually run MS-provided VMs of WInXP, Vista, 7 and 8 for free. They’re meant for development / testing against IE, but other than having to reset the activation period every 90 days, I haven’t run into any real limitations on use.

      1. I guess there’s a 50% chance of that. XP was better than 2k but just by a hair, Visa sucked compared to XP, Win 7 was much better than Vista, Win 8 was ridiculously stupid compared to Win 7, Win 8.1 was marginally better than 8 but still junk, so they’re only batting around 50%. Them’s not great odds. They have clearly improved the odds by skipping Windows 9. That makes a massive difference.

    1. I think it was more to artificially distance themselves from Window 8. Also, “10” is good for marketing purposes, which is why Apple (Steve Jobs) also targeted (in a much more subtle way), getting to version 10 (“X”) at the same time as the release of their new UNIX-based OS (and staying at 10 since then).

    2. I thought Microsoft named Windows “XP” to match it with Apple’s OS X. Windows ’10’ is more like a cry for help from a company going so senile it count the number 9. It’s time to break out The White Album and force them to listen…

    3. Actually they decided to name it Windows 10 because in early testing they found that a lot of software checked the major version of the OS and if was “9” the software assumed the user was running Windows 9X as in 95 or 98 and would either refuse to run or try to run in compatibility mode.

      They skipped version 9 to avoid a headache.

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