Look forward to a virtual past

Running another operating system within macOS has been a specialist pursuit requiring heavyweight apps such as Parallels Desktop or VMware Fusion. It has also been more tricky on Apple silicon Macs, but with Ventura – and, to some extent, Monterey – Apple has unleashed lightweight virtualisation.

There are several lightweight apps like VirtualBuddy (bit.ly/ mac383virtualbuddy) for Apple silicon Macs that enable you to keep a working copy of macOS 12 to hand after you’ve upgraded to 13. Others offer Linux with or without a GUI, for anyone wanting easy access to its wealth of tools, although Windows remains unsupported.

In the future we should expect to rely more on lightweight virtualisation to run older software as macOS diverges further and faster.