“Can I play WoW on my Mac?” was the recent question I got from a friend, a Mac user, who wants to experience World of Warcraft for the first time. You know how hardcore Mac users are, right? You wouldn’t ever dare suggest to a Mac user, “why don’t you switch to Windows PC or laptop for playing WoW?”
Anyway, the short answer is yes, you can. Blizzard released WoW simultaneously for Mac OS X and Windows on November 23, 2004. So it was meant to be run on Macs right from the release. You can download the game client here.
However, there is more to it. Installing WoW on Mac also requires minimal hardware requirements as on PCs. You can read them on Battle.net website (under the Mac tab), but in a nutshell:
World of Warcraft System Requirements
As long as your Mac has the minimum specifications or better, you are good to go for an adventure in Azeroth. Technically all Macs from 2012 and up should run WoW. But it’s the matter of CPU and a graphics card under the hoods, how well the game performs.
Mac: Minimum
- Operating System: macOS® 10.13
- Processor: Intel® Core™ i5-4670 or Apple M1
- Video: NVIDIA® GeForce® GT 750M 2 GB or AMD Radeon™ R9 M290 2 GB or Intel® UHD 630 (macOS 10.13 or higher, 45W) or Apple M1 Metal capable GPU
- Memory: 4 GB RAM
- Storage: 100GB available space on SSD or HDD
For the best gaming experience its recommended that your Mac has at least the following specs:
Mac: Recommended
- Operating System: macOS® 11.0
- Processor: Intel® Core™ i7-6700K or Apple M1 Max or better
- Video: AMD Radeon™ RX Vega 64 8 GB or Apple M1 Max or better
- Memory: 8 GB RAM
- Storage: 100GB available space on SSD or HDD
Here are some other questions a Mac user may ask and are worth answering:
Can you play WoW on Macbook Pro or Macbook Air?
Whether this is a Macbook Pro or MacBook Air, you can always play World of Warcraft if the laptop meets official World of Warcraft Mac requirements.
Can World of Warcraft be run natively on M1 Macs?
There is a lot of buzz about the new M1 Mac computers with Apple ARM-based CPUs. When the M1 Macs were unveiled, Apple didn’t hesitate to proclaim them revolutionary.
M1 Macs outperform their Intel-based equivalents by a wide margin in gaming performance, even in games not natively compatible with M1 yet. This one is huge, and Blizzard, on November 17, 2020, responded by adding native Apple Silicon support to World of Warcraft from WoW 9.0.2 client.
All Mac users can now natively run World of Warcraft on their Apple M1, ARM-based machines. Here’s a great video, showing how well Apple M1 performs, even with large raids:
