Microsoft (Sort of) Officially Sanctions Running Windows 11 on Apple’s M1/M2 Macs
When Apple moved to its own silicon, Mac computers lost a feature called Boot Camp. This allowed dual booting between macOS and other operating systems such as Windows. Microsoft now officially certifies Macs with M1 and M2 processors to run Windows 11.today it New support page published (opens in new tab) It’s entitled “Options for using Windows 11 on Mac computers with Apple M1 and M2 chips.”
Options for doing so aren’t necessarily new — Microsoft is pushing Windows 365 cloud PCs Or use Parallels Desktop 18 — but this is the first time I’ve seen Microsoft provide Windows guidance to Mac users since Boot Camp was discontinued. It generally seems to be aimed at business users only.
Windows 365 Cloud PC is now available on Business and Enterprise plans (opens in new tab), starting at $31 per user per month. In this case, you can stream Windows 11 to your Mac (or any device) via Software as a Service. The advantage of this is that Windows 365 offers nested virtualization. This allows you to run emulators and get full compatibility with features that require virtualization, such as running Android apps from the Amazon app store.
For most people, Parallels Desktop 18 might be a better choice, but it starts at $99.99/year for standard home and student editions, and $119.99 and $149.99/year for subscription services for professional and business editions. is. Microsoft says it is approved to run Arm versions of Windows 11 Pro and Windows 11 Enterprise.
Windows 11 on Arm has many of the same limitations for Macs as PCs designed for Windows. The support page states, “The Arm version of Windows 11 may affect your ability to use various types of hardware, games, and apps, including those that rely on DirectX 12 or OpenGL3.3 or higher. There are certain restrictions.” In other words, don’t expect to use the M2 Max’s GPU cores for gaming on Windows 11 on Arm.
However, going the Parallels route also doesn’t allow nested virtualization, so you can’t run Android or the Windows Subsystem for Linux (run Android apps from the Amazon app store, or run the GNU environment on Windows). For). Isolate some memory from the OS using Windows Sandbox or Virtualization Based Security (VBS).
Additionally, 32-bit Arm apps from the Microsoft Store on Windows will not work on Macs with M1 and M2 processors (Apple has stopped supporting 32-bit apps on macOS Catalina). However, Microsoft says that 32-bit Arm apps are “in the process of being phased out in all Arm versions of Windows.” Ideally, you want to run 64-bit Arm apps on your Mac, but you can also emulate x64 or x86 apps.
We do not believe that this news means that Microsoft will release the Arm version of Windows 11 to the public. Microsoft told me that “Parallels Desktop is currently the only allowed option to support Windows 11 in VMs on Macs.” Parallels is used to run Windows 11 for quite some time However, on M-series Macs, Installing Windows 11 is the easy part of setting up the app (opens in new tab).
It’s not clear why Microsoft is putting this page up now, but to make it clear that it’s the officially accepted way to get Windows 11 on your Mac. But hey, if it helps someone find what they’re looking for, we’d all welcome it. we can only dream.
