As expected, the launch of SimCity for Mac has been plagued by problems so we’ve gathered a few of the most common solutions here in one place. Eventually the developer of SimCity Maxis will fix all of these problems but until now, you’ll have to use these workarounds. If there are any issues not covered on this list, please let us know about them in the comments below. Remember you can only download and install SimCity using Origin and that SimCity for Mac requires at least OS X 10.7.5+ to work – the full operating requirements are displayed below. Note that it does not work with the beta version of OS X 10.9 Mavericks yet.
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Install Button Does Nothing / SimCity Won’t Install
Uninstall Origin and then reinstall Origin on your Mac and opt in to the new Beta version. It’s recommended that you use a free uninstaller such as AppCleaner to make sure Origin and SimCity are definitely removed from your Mac.
To opt into the beta version, follow these instructions:
- Open Origin
- Select Origin>Application Settings
- Under GENERAL ensure “Origin Beta Participation” is checked
- Close Origin
- Restart your Mac
- Load Origin and it should automatically update
- Install SimCity
mutexAlert Error Message
This is usually because two instances of SimCity are running at the same time. Make sure only one version is running and if you are not sure, shutdown your Mac and restart the game.
SimCity For Mac Performance And Display Issues
It seems that SimCity doesn’t play very well in full 1920 x 1080 resolution on a Mac, even on MacBook Pros. For now, the best resolution for the game to run reliably is 1200×800. The solution for many people is to switch back to using Parallels to play SimCity on Mac which bizarrely works better. SimCity works great in Parallels using either Windows 7 or 8 at 2560×1440 resolution. If you buy the PC version, you will get the Mac version for free too so it makes sense to get the PC version anyway. If you don’t want to pay for Parallels then you can use free VirtualBox or BootCamp instead. For more on how to run Windows on Mac, check our guide.
There are other problems and issues that SimCity users are suffering on Mac, the solutions to you can find here on the EA SimCity For Mac help page.
