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You are correct in that Qualcomm has that agreement. However, there's WAY more preventing a Boot Camp type of solution to exist on Apple Silicon Macs. Apple doesn't use UEFI on Apple Silicon Macs the way they did on Intel Macs (nor the way the PC world has done with Windows 8, 8.1, 10, and 11 based PCs whether x86, x86-64, or ARM64). They use iBoot. Apple and Microsoft would need to engineer an entirely different bootloader and even then, Apple would need to provide the drivers for all of Apple's custom SoC components (the GPU, custom video engines and co-processors, the neural engine, the SSD controller, etc.). There really would be a lot more that would need to happen than happened to make Boot Camp possible on an Intel Mac.
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Yeah, I think Boot Camp is a thing of the past. My hope had been that Apple Silicon would be powerful enough to virtualize Windows if all the licensing stuff works out and software dev moves more towards ARM. We’ll see, but even so, I don’t think Apple is going to stay far enough out ahead to keep virtualization competitive for all tasks.

So, IMO, if you need a powerful Windows solution (especially GPU power), it will mean a separate Windows box or some kind of cloud solution. The good news, is that the ‘remote control’ tech and network, even Internet, has gotten good enough to actually pull this off. My son has been using GeForce Go for FPS gaming (and I’ve tried it as well). If that works, there is no reason I can’t used a PC in the house, or even one in the cloud, to do pretty much any kind of work within a window on my Mac. It is just going to require some hardware/subscription in addition to my Mac.

That isn’t my ideal solution, but at least it is possible now. In the past, I’d have had to switch between two different machines, which is just physically inconvenient. That’s why I resisted it so heavily, and tried to use Mac-based solutions like Boot Camp. Costs aside, I’m now less concerned.
 
Yeah, I think Boot Camp is a thing of the past. My hope had been that Apple Silicon would be powerful enough to virtualize Windows if all the licensing stuff works out and software dev moves more towards ARM. We’ll see, but even so, I don’t think Apple is going to stay far enough out ahead to keep virtualization competitive for all tasks.

So, IMO, if you need a powerful Windows solution (especially GPU power), it will mean a separate Windows box or some kind of cloud solution. The good news, is that the ‘remote control’ tech and network, even Internet, has gotten good enough to actually pull this off. My son has been using GeForce Go for FPS gaming (and I’ve tried it as well). If that works, there is no reason I can’t used a PC in the house, or even one in the cloud, to do pretty much any kind of work within a window on my Mac. It is just going to require some hardware/subscription in addition to my Mac.

That isn’t my ideal solution, but at least it is possible now. In the past, I’d have had to switch between two different machines, which is just physically inconvenient. That’s why I resisted it so heavily, and tried to use Mac-based solutions like Boot Camp. Costs aside, I’m now less concerned.
I think it's more work than before. But I also think that Apple and Microsoft have every incentive to make it work if they can. But it'll entail even less control over the OS installation than what we have with T2 Macs, which is already less control than one would have over Boot Camp with a 2014 and earlier Intel Mac.

But yeah, to your point, if one is running x86 or x64 Windows apps, then it's better to just get a separate Windows PC. Not efficient on cost or space. But certifiably a better experience all around.
 
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FWIW, you can download http://swcatalog.apple.com/content/catalogs/others/index-windows-1.sucatalog, which contains everything available in Apple Software Update on Windows. Then scroll to the bottom to see the newest entries; right now, there's nothing for 2023. The newest Boot Camp update appears to be from 2022-08-29.

You can then look for the ServerMetadataURL and download that. For example, http://swcdn.apple.com/content/down...dxosc171ytixty20vuqg0r0n/WINDOWS_BootCamp.smd. That file will already tell you the version number (in this case, 6.1.19).

Then look for the section that says English, copy the entire data blob, and paste it into Terminal as follows:

pbpaste | tr -d ' ' | base64 -D

This removes the whitespace and Base64-decodes the text. That'll get you HTML back, which in turn contains the release notes.
 
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