That's a bare minimum of $250 on top of the premium cost you pay for Apple's hardware. If you plan to use Boot Camp exclusively, you can skip this line item. VirtualBox is a free option, but when I looked at it a few months ago it was behind the others in terms of Windows support. I've been able to find discounts that take the cost into the sub-$60 range. Virtualization software $0-80 I've been testing VMWare Fusion and Parallels Desktop 6 for Mac.You can find it discounted from legitimate resellers for roughly $250, so let's use that price. OEM copies are allowed only on new physical hardware.) At the Microsoft Store, that shrink-wrapped product costs $300. (Upgrades are only allowed if you are replacing the installed copy of OS X or a previous version of Windows installed in a VM. Windows 7 Professional $250 Under Windows license terms, the only option a normal consumer has for Windows 7 in a VM on a Mac is what's called a Full Packaged Product (FPP) license.And if your can't-live-without it Windows app is Microsoft Office or an accounting program or a point-of-sale system, well, you have to pay for that too. You can pay for virtualization software or find a free alternative, but Windows itself isn't free. There's the monetary cost of software, of course, but there are also some hidden performance costs.

Before you try it, though, you should learn about the costs-some of them not so obvious at first glance. But after a recent memory and disk upgrade I've been looking at virtualization software for OS X, which allows me to run Windows without having to first shut down OS X. On the Mac, I originally installed Windows 7 on a Boot Camp partition. So if a virtual machine can handle both Windows and OS X apps gracefully, I would have a much easier time moving back and forth. I have a handful of Windows programs that don't have Mac alternatives, and I have both a Mac and a Windows PC on my desktop. That's actually a pretty compelling pitch for me. Apple pitches it as the way to run 'specialty software.' You know, 'that one Windows application. That's a big selling point for Apple, which gives this feature a marquee position on its 'Why You'll Love a Mac' page.

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