This is my first post here. Let me just say that I love Simtropolis.
It's an an amazing community for an amazing game and I admire the hard work of all the batters and modders.
I'd like to help out all the hardcore fans who have switched to the Mac to have best Simcity 4 experience.
After the huge disappointment with the Aspyr release I've been experimenting with VMware Fusion. With VMware you can run any version of Windows in a virtual machine right on your Mac Desktop. Simcity 4 works great and the speed is unbelievable. On my i5 quad core iMac I can watch movies while the game is running in an another window, not a sweat from the machine, even with larger (300.000+) cities. Runs great on Core 2 Duo Intel Macbook Pros too. I seriously recommend everyone to ditch the sluggish Mac version and use the Win version instead.
Important! In order to make the game work properly you must
Make sure VMware is configured to use 1 processor in the virtual machine (Settings / Processors & RAM)
Run the game as an administrator in compatibility mode (XP or Vista if you have Win7), right click on Simcity 4.exe and click Properties / Compatibiltity
Make sure you force software rendering by running the game like this: Simcity 4.exe -d:software (you can create a desktop shortcut for your convenience)
Disable Color Cursor in the Graphic options menu (screen icon) of Simcity 4 (this is optional based on your Windows version, I had some flickering issues)
Extra tip
You can disable the intro if you also add the -intro:off parameter when running the game
Desktop shortcut
Target: C:\Windows\System32\cmd.exe /C START "Simcity 4" /high /affinity 1 "C:\Program Files\Maxis\SimCity 4 Deluxe\Apps\SimCity 4.exe" -intro:off -d:software
Start in: "C:\Program Files\Maxis\SimCity 4 Deluxe\Apps"
So if you have the Win version of Simcity 4 and a Windows license lying around, get VMware and try it out! I think they have free trials so there's nothing to lose.
Have fun!