If you really must run windows, its fairly simply on a Mac, and generally the Mac runs it better than a PC does, especially the new M1 machines.
https://www.parallels.com/uk/pd/gen...HQGxxE2SQj_n0oklRoowt3GD7I-njufBoCznoQAvD_BwE
This is not true anymore. While older, Intel-based macs could run Windows pretty well when natively booted (or run in a VM), M1 macs are a completely different CPU architecture to (the vast majority of) Windows laptops, so they can’t run the normal retail builds of Windows natively, and must translate the code as they go (a process known as hardware emulation). This incurs a performance penalty.
A Virtual Machine is different from an emulator, in that a VM runs on the same type of CPU as the hosted operating system: because the CPU is the same, the instruction code in the hosted OS can be run directly by the CPU, just as fast as the native OS - this is what software like QEMU or VMWare does. However, when you have a different kind of CPU (as Apple now does), it is unable to execute the Intel CPU instruction codes contained in your Windows install, so another piece of software is needed to first translate those instructions into blocks of ARM operation codes that do the same job. This translation layer process takes time, and can never produce better code than the original. (Apple’s “Rosetta” system for running old Intel software is such a layer). Translation can be done on-the-fly or ahead of time. The latter (used by Rosetta) gives faster execution times in exchange for a slow startup, but is impractical when you’re emulating a whole OS and its applications.
Basically, Parallels on a new mac is fine if you need some low-performance line-of-business application that your employer uses for raising POs or whatever, but it will grind to a halt if you try using it to run something like SolidWorks.
The “Macs even run Windows better than PCS” thing in general is bogus: an equivalently-priced Windows laptop will run Windows as well as or better than a Mac will. There’s are no free lunches, and people shouldn’t be surprised that paying three times as much for a laptop gives you a longer working life and better performance; the only difference is that there are no cheap Mac laptops to directly compare with cheap Windows ones, and because Windows laptop customers are allowed to buy to their budget, it’s no surprise that the majority of Windows laptops cost a lot less than Mac ones. One thing is true, though: a second-hand Mac you can buy for £400 is an inferior computer to a new Windows laptop you can buy for £400, and both have about the same amount of life left in them.
Actually, this is a bad time to buy a second-hand Mac anyway. Most Mac users arrived after the last big architecture change (2005), and don’t remember the drastically shortened support for PowerPC models once the Intel ones had filled the range; towards the end, new software was only available in Intel-native builds, which were just unusable on the PowerPC machines - not much point in having an OS if you’ve no application software to run on it. If you are buying now, do not buy an Intel-based model - you will find it becomes unsupported by software producers very quickly, and its resale value will drop like a stone.