Mac Mini 2018 MacOS Sedona or Ventura running Boot Camp?

I have purchased a MacMini 2018 Intel CPU for the specific purpose of using it with Boot Camp. I have several specific questions:


Will MacOS Sedona support Boot Camp on this supported Intel Mac Mini?


Will Boot Camp running on MacOS Sedona (or Ventura) support Windows 11 Pro or just Windows 10?


Any performance differences between Boot Camp and Parallels for Windows 10 or 11 On this intel Mac?


Thanks for any help!!!

Posted on Oct 7, 2023 8:32 AM

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20 replies

Oct 7, 2023 9:17 AM in response to William Mcclatchey1

William Mcclatchey1 wrote:

I have purchased a MacMini 2018 Intel CPU for the specific purpose of using it with Boot Camp. I have several specific questions:

Will MacOS Sedona support Boot Camp on this supported Intel Mac Mini?

Its Sonoma, and yes.



Will Boot Camp running on MacOS Sedona (or Ventura) support Windows 11 Pro or just Windows 10?

Windows 10, but once installed, you may be able to update to Windows 11 by doing some unsupported maneuvers. However the drivers may not all work once updated.



Any performance differences between Boot Camp and Parallels for Windows 10 or 11 On this intel Mac?

Yes. Boot camp allows the full use of the hardware for Windows and the OSes run independently of each other, which means you can only access one a a Time.


Parallels shares the resources, runs in a Window on macOS and will only be able to allocate at most half of the available Ram to Windows but has the benefit of being able to access both OSes at the same time. Windows will definitely see a performance hit when using Virtualization, over boot camp.


Oct 7, 2023 9:53 AM in response to William Mcclatchey1

Windows 11 Pro licenses are dirt cheap over at Stacksocial right now. So are Office 2021 for Windows and Mac. However, make certain that Apple is now offering Windows 11 driver support for Boot Camp before you think about Windows 11.


Windows 11 Pro 22H2 is much slower to boot up than its 22H1 predecessor, and that is with all of the default TeamViewer crap disabled. There was just a large update that should have been branded 23H1 with Co-Pilot (Chat GPT), but Microsoft is choosing to continue its 22H2 designation.


Be very careful to read the Boot Camp documentation that dialabrain pointed you to, and not wing it as many have accidentally wiped out their macOS partition with careless Windows partition formatting.

Oct 7, 2023 10:51 AM in response to dialabrain

I am referring to a Parallels Desktop Pro 19 Windows 11 Pro guest on a 2020 Core i7 iMac with 8 cpu, 16 GB RAM, and 1GB GPU configured for the guest. I am thinking that your timing is about right for the 22H1 version of this guest (even as a Parallels Guest here), but the 22H2 can take up to 30 seconds, even after I shutoff the TeamViewer junk. I have a Windows 10 22H2 guest with the same resource configuration and it boots up in about half the time.


What is odd is that sometimes Windows 11 Pro Update shows it last checked a minute ago, which means during boot, and other times, shows it last checked 3 days ago.

Oct 7, 2023 1:29 PM in response to dialabrain

Thanks so much for your response, and sorry for the computer generated conversion of "Sonoma" to "Sedona".


Your response is clear and I will start with an ISO of Windows 10 Pro until I find that Apple supports Win 11 Pro in Boot Camp. I have used Parallels before and found it slower but more stable than Boot Camp where I have add the occasional burp in the software. I have also tried to use Parallels on Apple M1 and M2 processors, and although it works, I find very little of my traditional Windows software that will run on the ARM Windows software.


An interesting question for which I don't know the answer is how many Intel based Macs will run Sonoma. The number likely declines with each MacOS version, which was one of my reasons for picking up the last MacMini model which had an Intel chip. I really like the reliability of Apple hardware, and for most things I run MacOS. So I always liked the flexibility of Boot Camp. I can only hope that Apple comes to support drivers for Windows 11 Pro, as I do like the interface of Windows 11 in comparison to Windows 10.

Mac Mini 2018 MacOS Sedona or Ventura running Boot Camp?

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