CrossOver Mac 16
A quick, cheap way to run Windows apps on your Mac
About $47 Developer Codeweavers, codeweavers.com Requirements OS X 10.8 or later, optical drive for some program installations If you want to run Windows apps or games on your Mac, CrossOver offers a potentially elegant – and cost-effective – solution. You don’t need to buy a copy of Windows, and you don’t need the hassle of setting up Boot Camp or a full-blown virtual machine just to run one program.
CrossOver is based on the open-source Wine project. You basically install Windows programs into self-contained “bottles,” which run a skeletal version of Windows – from 98 up to Windows 10. There’s no underlying desktop environment; instead, bottles can simply be accessed and run directly from your Mac desktop as if they were native apps.
The downside is that CrossOver isn’t guaranteed to work with all programs – and even those that are supported can be buggy, crashing or not behaving as you’d expect. This is why trying the 14-day trial before purchase is essential. If it’s a commercial title, you’ll probably need to provide the original installer disc (Remote Disc works well, if required). Even if a program isn’t listed in CrossOver, that doesn’t mean it won’t work; many simply haven’t been tested, while others require a bit more effort (with the caveat that they may not work).
You can create your own bottles from scratch, add prerequisites for your program (such as the .NET Framework) and then attempt
to install apps yourself. You can tweak bottles too, to try to improve performance, boost compatibility, or simply integrate them better with your Mac desktop. In version 16, the underlying engine has been updated to Wine 2.0, plus there’s now support for Office 2013 and 64-bit bottles – the latter should improve performance and compatibility.
CrossOver has always sold itself as a more user-friendly front-end for Wine; version 15 added a redesigned wizard to make verifying and installing any of the 13,000 or so programs in its database as easy as possible, and there’s also a much-improved bottle management page for viewing, launching, and editing your Windows apps.
Crossover will ultimately be judged on its results, but if you can get them working, you’ll find it’s the most elegant solution for integrating old Windows apps and games. We recommend you pay a bit extra for the $60 package, which comes with one year’s free updates and support, in which time more apps should become compatible.
the bottom line. A smart, effective and great way to run selected Windows apps on your Mac.