A $100-per-year subscription to Parallels guarantees you'll always have the latest version. The best virtualization software for most end-users keeps getting better because of its ease of use and just works design. For those folks, it comes highly recommended.įor everyone else, especially home-based non-techies, there's still nothing better than Parallels for Mac. Oracle supporters, IT professionals, developers, and anyone else who likes to play around with open-source software will almost certainly love using VirtualBox. If VirtualBox ever hopes to expand its reach beyond its ideal type of users, a good place to begin would be to improve documentation in this regard.Īs things stand, the installation process, depending on your skill level, could quickly feel like an unwelcoming trip to Wonderland.

Better still, the language used to explain any recommended settings should be expanded.įinally, while VirtualBox supports a large number of operating systems (and versions), any assistance it provides in finding those systems to download, especially the older ones, is mostly lacking. Specifically, VirtualBox could do a better job of explaining the importance of each step in the process. Overall, I found the installation process somewhat easy to perform, although some of the prompts didn't make sense. For virtual machines, I selected the latest version of Windows and Ubuntu Linux 64-bit. Installationįor this review, I installed VirtualBox 6.1.2 on my 2018 MacBook Pro. On a positive note, VirtualBox 6.1, which arrived in early January, has improved the interface greatly, however. This rough design of VirtualBox itself makes it look older and less crisp than any other app on your Mac.

Virtual box for mac m1