Windows comes to Apple M1 silicon as Parallels delivers native desktop hypervisor Two new Windows-on-Arm options have come into view. The easy option is a new version of Parallels desktop, the company’s desktop hypervisor for macOS. Version 16.5. released Wednesday, is now offered in a native version for Apple’s own M1 silicon. Parallels says the new offering is for Windows 10 ARM Insider Preview and “the …
Me too :-(
Though it's getting on a bit, I do like my Mac, and I do almost no development directly on my laptop these days - it's all RDP to clients' systems. Unfortunately many of them insist on Windows-only remote access solutions - a couple are even IE only! - so I end up booted into Windows too much of the time to risk an M1 mac at the moment. Guess I need to find a way to test the ARM version of Windows with the VPN clients, then this might be an option.
The Windows Insider ARM build of Windows 10 that Parallels is advertising support for includes an x86-64 emulator for application code. So in theory you get all of the OS-level stuff running natively on the M1 (modulo virtualisation of the other hardware) and then x86 emulation only for the actual applications — and you get Microsoft's emulation for Windows applications rather than Apple's, which is likely to be better-supported for that task.
So the Parallels release mentioned in the story isn't necessarily a bad choice for running regular old Windows applications on an M1 Mac.
That said, I think I'm going to wait for VMWare. When I last tried Parallels — which was likely more than a decade ago, so apply a pinch of salt — it was heavily invested in the idea of a shared desktop running multiple flavours of application, to the extent of secreting various hidden folders around my Mac full of application stubs so that the Finder would have something to connect file associations to, e.g. so that I could double click a .docx on my desktop and have that cause Parallels to load and launch the Windows Microsoft Office and then open that file in it.
That's something that some people will be a huge fan of, but I want my virtual machines isolated and with a minimal footprint on my Mac. VMWare seems to do a better job of that.
Oracle has not said if its VirtualBox desktop hypervisor will target the M1, but a port is considered very unlikely due to technical issues
I read that thread. I don't think it's "technical issues" I think it's people getting confused what hypervisors do & do not do and hence what they can expect.
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