Microsoft today published a support page (Opens in a new window) that shows how Mac users can run Windows 11 on their Apple Silicon M1- and M2-powered Macs.
Previously, Alludo (rebranded Corel) announced the capability in its Parallels Desktop virtual machine software, but by publishing the options on its support page, Redmond officially acknowledges that the setup works and is approved.
Installing Windows directly on a Mac using Apple’s Boot Camp feature isn’t an option unless your Mac has an Intel CPU, so it doesn’t work with M1- and M2-based Macs.
The support page details how to run Windows 11 on Apple Silicon Macs. In general, there are two options: using a Windows 365 cloud PC and using Parallels Desktop.
The first option is only available to business and enterprise customers, and is priced accordingly, with Windows 365 starting at $31 per user per month. With this option, the OS is running on Microsoft servers connected to your PC (or Mac or iPad) via superfast broadband. So it’s no surprise that it can run on M1 and M2 Macs. Buyers of the service choose how many CPUs, and how much RAM and storage they want to pay for. This solution enables companies to easily manage a fleet of devices.
(credit: Microsoft)
For everyday personal users, the Parallels route is best suited. According to the newly published support page, “Parallels Desktop Edition 18 is an authorized solution for running Arm editions of Windows 11 Pro and Windows 11 Enterprise on Apple M1 and M2 computers in a virtual environment on their platform.”
In this case, the Windows OS is actually running on the Mac in a virtual machine, unlike Windows 365. Hence it is Windows on Arm edition instead of standard Windows 11. That means it comes with the limitations of that Arm version, including the lack of certain hardware drivers, appsparticularly games and antivirus softwarethat don’t support the platform. Apps that optimize Windows, such as “input method editors (IMEs), assistive technologies, and cloud storage apps” only work if they specifically support Windows 11 on Arm. Games that require DirectX 12 or OpenGL3.3 will also not run.
You also won’t get some of Windows 11’s hottest new features, including:
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Windows Subsystem for Android, which enables your Windows 11 device to run Android applications available in the Amazon Appstore.
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Windows Subsystem for Linux, which enables the GNU/Linux environment on Windows 11.
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Windows Sandbox, a lightweight desktop environment for securely running applications in isolation.
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Virtualization-based security (VBS), which enables clients to create and isolate a secure area of memory from the normal operating system.
Finally, you won’t be able to run 32-bit Windows Arm apps on your Apple Silicon Mac, but they’re in the process of being deprecated on all Windows platforms, so most people won’t run into this issue. Despite those severe restrictions, it’s still possible to play a lot of cool games via Parallels (Opens in a new window) on existing Macs running Windows 11.
In my own experience using a Surface Pro X, which has an Arm CPU, the system is usable but sometimes flaky, and a good number of apps in the Microsoft Store aren’t compatible. That said, Microsoft isn’t neglecting its Windows on Arm flavor: The company made a big push toward the platform when it introduced Project Volterra, aka Windows Dev Kit 2023, at its annual Build conference last spring. Did. It is a Mac mini-like desktop computer that “supports the Snapdragon 8cx Gen 3 Compute Platform and utilizes the Qualcomm Neural Processing SDK.”
Other virtualization software lets you run Windows on a Mac, but this parallelization option is the only one to have received Microsoft’s official blessing.
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