So here are all the ingredients you will need for this upgrade process: This process is potentially destructive to all the data on your hard disk! Getting startedīefore you do anything else, make sure you have a complete backup of all your data.
However, if you need both OSs all the time, I find the VM approach to be easier to use.įor my purpose BootCamp was ideal: I decided to use Windows as my primary OS and so my goal was to partition the hard disk into a minimal MacOS partition (60GB) and use the rest of my 1TB SSD drive for Windows 10. I know of many people who divide their hard disk into equal partitions to be able to switch back and forth between MacOS and Windows as needed. You can then decide which partition you want to boot from by default, and you can also switch the partition to boot from upon startup by holding down the “Option” key.
However, once I realized I wasn’t using any MacOS-specific software anymore, I decided to instead use BootCamp to do a clean, native install of Windows as my primary OS on the machine.īootCamp comes preinstalled in MacOS and allows you to partition your hard-drive and install Windows in parallel to MacOS as a native OS (rather than inside a VM).
I had previously been using VMWare Fusion to occasionally run Windows applications on my Mac in a virtual machine, and that had worked really well for casual usage from time to time.
Looking at the available options for new Windows laptops, I found that they were not really superior to the laptop I already had, so I wanted to see if I could use Windows 10 on my MacBook Pro instead. While I began to realize that I didn’t need to use MacOS anymore, I still wasn’t ready to give up my favorite laptop hardware. In fact, I expect this migration to produce some productivity increases due to keyboard shortcuts finally being the same across all my devices. So I came to the conclusion that switching back and forth between using MacOS at home and Windows in the office was no longer giving me any tangible benefits.
You may ask why anybody would want to convert a MacBook Pro into a Windows 10 laptop in the first place. I’m very happy with the result and this is now going to be my main laptop for all my business trips (and vacations) going forward. In fact, startup times, as well as time to wake from sleep, are slightly better than under MacOS, and all of the software, including Office, Adobe Creative Suite, etc., appears to perform better as well. The process was surprisingly straight-forward, and the machine runs extremely well with all hardware features fully supported, including the high-resolution screen (“Retina display”), integrated camera (“iSight”), WiFi, Bluetooth, and all external ports. With the recent release of Windows 10, I embarked on a fun weekend project to convert my old MacBook Pro laptop (late 2013 model) into a new Windows 10 laptop.