M1Pro Bootcamp - is it possible already?

[Gintoki-kun]

Sometime late this year or earlier next year (when the M2Pro launches), I’m going to buy the base 15” M1Pro

I do have some needs for Windows. But not enough to buy a windows machine over a Mac.

I know when M1 was launched 2 years ago, bootcamp sort of died… has the situation changed, or is (unfortunately) Parallels still the only option ?

Thank you

 

[hoo-man-b-ing]

Nope, and it’s unlikely to change anytime soon due to a rumored licensing deal with Qualcomm that has no known end date.

Plus, there’s not much incentive for Apple to support Bootcamp.

 

[Gintoki-kun]

Nope, and it’s unlikely to change anytime soon due to a rumored licensing deal with Qualcomm that has no known end date.

Plus, there’s not much incentive for Apple to support Bootcamp.

How “bad” is parallels right now? Limitations wise

Any real deal breaker?

 

[hoo-man-b-ing]

DX12 is currently the biggest issue, though that may change with Apple’s recent Metal 3 updates.

Personally, Parallels has worked remarkably well and I appreciate the fact that I can just copy and zip up the whole drive and restore it at any time (whereas backing up Windows was always a crapshoot in my experience).

I’m even using the locked down App Store edition of Parallels which is more restrictive (4 CPU cores and 8GB RAM) because I can’t stand all the other integration/services the other versions install. Even in this restricted mode, it performs quite well for my needs (some gaming, .NET coding, etc)

 

[Yael-S.]

Asahi Linux and OpenBSD are close to the point where they should start working properly on the M1 and M2 chips. In certain aspects, they are already more stable and/or faster than macOS at the moment.

I wonder if you can't simply run the windows apps on Asahi Linux via wine?

https://twitter.com/x/status/1532229621357625345

In particular, if you want to run Windows games on Wine, FEX is your only option, since it is almost impossible to install and run Windows apps without involving 32-bit code at some point.

Another option might be to use bhyve. Apple has copied bhyve from FreeBSD and given it its own name. With bhyve on FreeBSd you can emulate windows10/11 and this gives higher performance than on Linux with KVM.

I'm not sure what the exact bhyve equivalent of macOS can do but it shouldn't be difficult for Apple to let it emulate windows10/11.

 

[chabig]

How “bad” is parallels right now? Limitations wise

Any real deal breaker?

You must realize that Parallels only runs Windows ARM. M1 Macs will never run Windows Intel.

 

[Nermal]

M1 Macs will never run Windows Intel.

I believe that UTM can do it in a pinch, but it's slow. I don't own an Arm machine so I can't say how slow, but I imagine it's similar to Virtual PC on PowerPC: usable when you really need it, but not something you want to use every day.

 

[Yebubbleman]

Sometime late this year or earlier next year (when the M2Pro launches), I’m going to buy the base 15” M1Pro

I do have some needs for Windows. But not enough to buy a windows machine over a Mac.

I know when M1 was launched 2 years ago, bootcamp sort of died… has the situation changed, or is (unfortunately) Parallels still the only option ?

Thank you

First off, there is no more 15-inch MacBook Pro. Not sure if you knew that or if that affects your buying choices, but still a relevant FYI nonetheless. There's a 16-inch and a 14-inch, with the latter largely replacing the 15-inch model from 2006-2019.

Second off, it's not that Boot Camp "sort of died" as much as Boot Camp was a feature that Apple could easily allow given that Intel Macs, Intel PCs, and AMD PCs all share the x86 (and x86-64 by extension) architecture and x86-64 being common between macOS and Windows made it easy to implement a native dual-boot solution. It also helped that Intel Macs and Intel and AMD PCs all use UEFI firmware, which is industry standard. Apple Silicon is technically an ARM64 derivative, but it's very much custom to Apple and the firmware that Apple uses isn't UEFI like other ARM64 computers use; but rather iBoot which is Apple's proprietary firmware system used in iOS, iPadOS, tvOS, watchOS, bridgeOS (for the T2 chip's own operation), and pretty much any other known Apple platform you can think of.

So, to make a "Boot Camp" type of solution work on Apple Silicon, you need (a) Microsoft opening up their licensing terms for Windows for ARM64 to allow it on more than just the few machines it ships with and (b) a serious collaboration between Apple and Microsoft to create drivers for Apple's SoCs and supporting hardware as well as an iBoot-compatible bootloader. This is A LOT more than what Apple would've otherwise had to do to get Boot Camp working for Intel Macs.

You can run Windows for ARM64 in a virtual machine. Parallels isn't your only option as there is now a version of VMware Fusion that will also let you spin up Windows for ARM64 VMs. However, do know that Microsoft doesn't support you doing this (even if VMware and Parallels does) and that you're stuck doing it with an Insider Preview (read: perpetual beta track) version. Will it run one or two simple x86 apps? Probably. But I wouldn't rely on it for prime time.