To start the Parallels installation process, you need to go to  on your Mac browser.Īfter selecting the Download Parallels Desktop button, a. Having Windows 10 already saved on a USB drive makes it faster to install Windows and beneficial if you have difficulty downloading Windows from the Internet. You will also need a valid Windows 10 license. For convenience, we purchased Windows 10 Home (USB flash drive version) from Best Buy. The Parallels Desktop 13 is actually just an empty box with a license key since the software is downloaded from the Internet. Here we used the 13' MacBook Pro (2017) with MacOS 10.13.1.įirst you will need to get a license for Parallels Desktop 13. We purchased Parallels from Best Buy which offered a one-time purchase and was actually cheaper than buying directly from Parallels which sold a more expensive subscription based option. Sometimes you just need to use Windows applications on a Mac. Parallels is an easy to way to open Windows Apps or use the Windows Operating System in a virtual machine while using your Mac Apps (unlike Bootcamp which requires you to boot up into Windows Operating System thus not allowing you to use Mac Apps at the same time). The main tradeoff with the virtual machine approach is slower processing speed of Windows Apps and more processor and memory resources needed on the Mac hardware.