Yeah I sold my VW right as the WiFi dongle came out. Still have the HEX USB interface though. Bought a Surface Pro just for the dongle, lol.
Got a tip for us?
Let us know
Become a MacRumors Supporter for $50/year with no ads, ability to filter front page stories, and private forums.
Popular application that only windows 10 can run
- Thread starter Danny82
- Start date
- Sort by reaction score
Nope, my answer applies directly to the question. Many companies (like IBM, for instance) have a user choice program that allows employees to choose either Mac or Windows. And many choose Mac. In many places, the only reason this works is because, with Bootcamp/Parallels/VMWare Fusion, Mac users are able to use the company's Window's-only custom software.
I.e, we have both consumer Mac users that are able to run needed Windows-only software b/c of Bootcamp, and enterprise Mac users that are able to run needed Windows-only software b/c of Bootcamp. Think it through: Logically, with respect to the question, there's no conceptual difference between the two groups. In both cases Bootcamp is allowing Mac users to run Windows-only software.
Now you might argue: "Yeah, but most of the machines running custom corporate Windows-only software are PC's, not Macs. Sure, but so what? It's also true that most of the machines running standard Windows-only software (e.g, MS Access, Framemaker, Revit) are also PC's, not Macs. That's just due to the fact that Macs are less common, and has nothing to do with the question.
Last edited:
Any Valve game that isn't Counter-Strike: Global Offensive or DotA 2 (at least as far as Catalina and newer Intel-based releases of macOS are concerned). 
Yes, and those CAT tools that are available for Mac are Java based and thus not fully integrated into macOS.
Besides, various auxiliary applications for translators are also Windows-only.
It's hardly possible to work as a translator without a Windows VM.
A lot of companies now, especially with move to cloud typically not running apps on actual desktop.
with move to remote working with Covid then again increase in VDI solutions so again not running apps on actual desktop.
devops movement with ci/cd doesn’t really work where pushing apps out to users desktops.
whilst there will be some that this doesn’t work for it will work for the vast majority of Mainstream users.
with move to remote working with Covid then again increase in VDI solutions so again not running apps on actual desktop.
devops movement with ci/cd doesn’t really work where pushing apps out to users desktops.
whilst there will be some that this doesn’t work for it will work for the vast majority of Mainstream users.
Won't matter how powerful the GPU is if what you want to run is not there. I know many chime in that they will use a windows machine for games but I will be blunt, if my Mac cannot run the games I am running today so that I need a PC just to enjoy them I will no longer own a Mac. Why would I waste money on a computer that ends up being nothing more than a glorified iPad. Not one game in the iOS store ever impressed me enough to think it was comparable to what I use on my iMac.
I would expect Apple is working with some of the larger companies to insure their games come to Apple Silicon base systems. I would expect it but I am worried they are not because I would have hoped they would have listed the companies they are working with to have software for the system. We need one.
I am way to entrenched in the Apple ecosystem to give up for windows, but this may effect my purchasing plans. Rather than another iMac (and assuming that the arm lineup is pretty much what they offer with the intel chip) I may decide to get the cheaper Mac Mini, and a screen that I can switch between two computers. Mac for general use, gaming/flight sim/whatever is better done on a pc for everything else.
I really hope apple is able to get game developers to step up and deliver same day/same game on arm macOS as PC, but I have my doubts that it will occur.
Important to note, but the viewer for Power BI works very well on just about every browser. Most people that use Power BI aren’t licensed for the desktop client.
So the 30 or so games I've got from Steam on my Mac are just figments of a game-starved imagination?
Let's be real here, you're referring to AAA titles, not "any" game?
If so, then why's that so hard to post?
I'm no AAA player, but I feel that there has to be at least a few titles available on the Mac.
Excuding WoW, the Diablo and Starcraft series, the 100+ games in my Steam library that have Mac versions including the newest Tomb Raider, Civ V, Knights of the Old Republic 1 & 2, Rise of the Tomb Raider (the same one they showed running on Apple Silicon during WWDC), Deus Ex, CS:GO, Borderlands 2, and Bioshock Remastered.
Last edited:
As far as common windows only workplace apps are concerned, running these on a virtual server and connecting via Microsoft Remote Desktop connection is a common solution. I worked with a Mac is a PC dominated business and this is how I accessed all the windows Apps including the ERP system. Was not much difference to running these apps natively. Most business apps are not GPU intensive.
Revit and 3ds Max. Not to mention most of the entire Autodesk suite needed for coordination. They got Maya over to multi-platform and AutoCAD on both but apparently even when Mac was x86 strong, the 3ds Max code was just going to take too long (developer on their forum said 2-3 years just for foundations) to port over. And the percentage of Revit users willing to switch over to Mac or waiting on it is small and likely already on other programs like Vectorworks or Archicad.
If Blender can port its OpenGL code to ARM with some help from Apple, then Rhino3D has a chance to move to ARM. But if Apple depreciates it entirely and doesn't provide that option then perhaps another prominent crossover tool is gone. Same for Modo, Nuke, Houdini, etc. Apple's ideal target audience for easy porting is incredibly narrow.
Q100421: Apple deprecating OpenGL and OpenCL in macOS 10.14 (Mojave)
SUMMARY This article explains how the OpenGL and OpenCL deprecation announcement by Apple will affect the Foundry products. MORE INFORMATION Apple have announced that they are deprecating OpenGL an...support.foundry.com
It's been a long-standing issue. I know Apple can do a lot of accelerators and stuff with Metal but for crossplatform, it's just such a damn hassle to develop specifically for it. And moving forward, developing for more or less a self-contained platform.
As someone else mentioned, Solidworks. Plenty of professional applications will likely just stay Windows now and drop their Mac equivalent moving forward. Or possibly look at the state of Linux usage. Dropping support for Nvidia entirely long ago does not help Apple either. These programs do run better under Quadro/FirePro. When running $300,000 simulations, don't trust accurate viewport to any onboard GPU.
this has been my major fear. And especially with rhino I think it will be gone without intervention from Apple.
basically this transition pushed me to move the business to Windows. I was already considering it and now have no regrets, as ALL the windows apps run better than on macOS (intel).
I am not sure if it is going to be worth the effort for those apps embedded in open gl.
I am not a developer so have no idea how easy or hard things are, but why have they proceeded right up until this day with OpenGL over metal for Macos apps? The ones I know of run sluggishly in MacOS compared to windows.
All it suggests to me is that they don’t prioritise the mac and this transition will be very slow if at all for those apps.
Yeah I have those too. I was being facetious. Nonetheless, there are many games that don't work and tons that run better on windows than the mac port. Tomb Raider being on the top of that list.
Kotor 1 & 2 I'm pretty sure are 32Bit and don't work under Catalina. I think the only reason we even have steam support at all is because it was easy enough for them to port it over to the x86-64 version of UNIX Mac OS X is. We will more than likely be going back to the gaming era of OS X PPC. Steam has already discontinued VR on macOS. I wouldn't be surprised if we lose steam support altogether on mac after the transition.
I don't really care all that much though as I have a Mac Pro 5,1 as well as a PC more than capable of gaming. And the older games I play work on my PPC Macs.
All Steam games he mentioned are 64-bit.
…which happened months before the switch to Arm CPUs was announced and had nothing to do with it. Also, Valve never actually released SteamVR for Mac. It never left an early developer beta stage.
I guess the unasked question here is: Will the lack of these apps be an issue for Apple?
It's cool that they could show some apps recompiled on Apple Silicon, but yes, it's likely that any Windows-first / only application that is 20+ years of legacy code isn't going to be easy to port. And it's probably not going to make economic sense for companies to do that, unless and until there's a massive move away from Windows in the mainstream.
But is that even Apple's market? They seem to have a very healthy market and profitability without these "prestige," but admittedly relatively niche applications. Most enterprise app makers whose core apps run on Windows Server / SQL Server offer web-based end-user interfaces or native 'client' apps where needed.
If you really, really need access to a machine, you could use Microsoft Remote Desktop to access a VM in the cloud or a desktop PC somewhere at your office (something we have seen take off with this era of remote work).
I don't think Apple will really lose sleep that there are some PC-only suites / games that won't ever be ported to MacOS or iOS. Or that Microsoft's business platform isn't native on Mac. It's not where they can offer value.
I think they would rather chase the new companies that don't have legacy technical debt or that are more nimble about offering native clients etc.
It's cool that they could show some apps recompiled on Apple Silicon, but yes, it's likely that any Windows-first / only application that is 20+ years of legacy code isn't going to be easy to port. And it's probably not going to make economic sense for companies to do that, unless and until there's a massive move away from Windows in the mainstream.
But is that even Apple's market? They seem to have a very healthy market and profitability without these "prestige," but admittedly relatively niche applications. Most enterprise app makers whose core apps run on Windows Server / SQL Server offer web-based end-user interfaces or native 'client' apps where needed.
If you really, really need access to a machine, you could use Microsoft Remote Desktop to access a VM in the cloud or a desktop PC somewhere at your office (something we have seen take off with this era of remote work).
I don't think Apple will really lose sleep that there are some PC-only suites / games that won't ever be ported to MacOS or iOS. Or that Microsoft's business platform isn't native on Mac. It's not where they can offer value.
I think they would rather chase the new companies that don't have legacy technical debt or that are more nimble about offering native clients etc.
You are absolutely correct. If a developer has a 20+ year legacy app that is inaccessible to Mac users, then the developer has no intention of ever supporting the Mac under any circumstances. It is probably biding its time before killing its lights, shutting its doors, and going home.
An example. My firm runs on an Oracle DBMS-based integrated application. Back in the 1990s, the developer had a Mac client as well as a Windows client. Then for a number of years, they ditched the Mac client. They then developed a Web app that allowed only a tiny subset of the access allowed by the Windows client. As Macs began to rise in prominence and popularity, the Windows standalone client was replaced by a browser-hosted Java class. The Web app continued. However, the Java class standalone client was platform agnostic. As Java fell into disrepute, the Java class was replaced by an HTML5 web app. The regular Web client continues to be developed.
The powers that be at my firm are now paralyzed by security concerns. We are historically a Windows shop. As a result, our Windows-based servers and other facilities are now virtualized in the Cloud. When we need access to a machine, Remote Desktop is the way to go. RDP clients work on Windows, Mac, and my iPhone and iPad.
In an era in which security is as important as it is, a 20+ year old legacy application on Windows is not something that you want in the hands of but a few. You host them on a virtual Windows Server with very few holes in the firewall.
I wont go on about this anymore, but the issue for me is this :
Apps I use in MacOS are not as good as the exact same version in Windows. If they haven’t bothered to make a great app whilst Apple was on Intel, why are they going to bother to work harder for Apple Silicon Macs?
Everytime I have mentioned this it gets dismissed.
However, I am talking apps such as Autocad, Rhino, Fusion 360, Twinmotion [which is unreal so I think that may go also]. It has taken a long time for the mac to be able to have these apps otherwise I would have been on a PC years ago.
It is irrelevant how good AS is and how fast metal is. If these companies don’t make the transition, there will be nothing left for me to justify Apple computer use in my business, and at present it is very tenuous as it is.
All the above apps are running very well on my PC. Revit, 3DS Max and Solidworks are also great, very popular apps that dont run on a mac at all.
I 100% believe cloud computing will be the saviour to all this and shouldn’t be too far away, to allow us to run these apps fluidly, remotely. Then I will be mac for life, rather than straddling the 2 systems.
Apps I use in MacOS are not as good as the exact same version in Windows. If they haven’t bothered to make a great app whilst Apple was on Intel, why are they going to bother to work harder for Apple Silicon Macs?
Everytime I have mentioned this it gets dismissed.
However, I am talking apps such as Autocad, Rhino, Fusion 360, Twinmotion [which is unreal so I think that may go also]. It has taken a long time for the mac to be able to have these apps otherwise I would have been on a PC years ago.
It is irrelevant how good AS is and how fast metal is. If these companies don’t make the transition, there will be nothing left for me to justify Apple computer use in my business, and at present it is very tenuous as it is.
All the above apps are running very well on my PC. Revit, 3DS Max and Solidworks are also great, very popular apps that dont run on a mac at all.
I 100% believe cloud computing will be the saviour to all this and shouldn’t be too far away, to allow us to run these apps fluidly, remotely. Then I will be mac for life, rather than straddling the 2 systems.
Moderator note: A number of posts have been deleted from this thread. Please try to stay on topic, and this might be a good time to review the MacRumors rules for appropriate debate.
Last edited:
Guys, Microsoft is pushing Windows 10 on ARM too. This is going to mean most of those Windows 10 apps you're talking about are also incentivised to go ARM on Windows, and since the Apple silicone Macs are going to be able to run W10 ARM virtually, you should be sweet!
I can see most employees in most companies eventually being issued ARM based laptops and devices as time goes on.
I can see most employees in most companies eventually being issued ARM based laptops and devices as time goes on.
