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![]() Boot Camp running on macOS Monterey | |
Developer(s) | Apple Inc. |
---|---|
Initial release | October 26, 2007 |
Stable release | |
Type | Software assistant for dual booting |
License | Proprietary |
Website | support |
Boot Camp Assistant is a multi boot utility included with Apple Inc.'s macOS (previously Mac OS X / OS X) that assists users in installing Microsoft Windows operating systems on Intel-based Macintosh computers. The utility guides users through non-destructive disk partitioning (including resizing of an existing HFS+ or APFS partition, if necessary) of their hard disk drive or solid-state drive and installation of Windows device drivers for the Apple hardware. The utility also installs a Windows Control Panel applet for selecting the default boot operating system.
Initially introduced as an unsupported beta for Mac OS X 10.4 Tiger,[1][2] the utility was first introduced with Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard and has been included in subsequent versions of the operating system ever since. Previous versions of Boot Camp supported Windows XP and Windows Vista. Boot Camp 4.0 for Mac OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard version 10.6.6 up to Mac OS X 10.8 Mountain Lion version 10.8.2 only supported Windows 7.[3] However, with the release of Boot Camp 5.0 for Mac OS X 10.8 Mountain Lion in version 10.8.3, only 64-bit versions of Windows 7 and Windows 8 are officially supported.[4][5]
Boot Camp 6.0 added support for 64-bit versions of Windows 10. Boot Camp 6.1, available on macOS 10.12 Sierra and later, will only accept new installations of Windows 7 and later; this requirement was upgraded to requiring Windows 10 for macOS 10.14 Mojave.
Boot Camp is currently not available on Apple silicon Macs.[6] Via virtualization, it is possible to run ARM-based Windows 10 (only Windows Insider builds, as they are the only publicly available ARM builds of Windows 10) and Windows 11 through the QEMU emulator,[7] VMWare Fusion, and Parallels Desktop virtualization software, which also allows Linux.[8]