Parallels for Apple Silicon Macs Now Supports Windows 11 Pro

[bobcomer]

This is quite interesting considering Microsoft is not selling Windows on ARM. I really don't understand how this thing fit

You're right, they don't sell a boxed/retail version of Windows on Arm, but the install ISO is easy enough to get and buying a license for Windows 11 is also easy and they do sell that, and that's all you need.

Parallels does the first part in getting you the installer, and you buying the license is the second part.

 

[jlc1978]

I use UTM with Win11 Pro Arm ( Mac OS 9 / 10.7 / 4 Variants of Ubuntu Arm + ) on MBA M2 with no Issue at all.
Neither UTM nor the Hosted VM´s or the Ventura MacOS ever crashed or hang in any way.

But jet, if some F up their Systems, things can happen

It never ran reliable on my M1 MBP. It would work for a while then hang on startup, necessitating redoing the install. I finally decided it simply wasn’t worth the hassle.

What are people using ARM for? The only common thing for ARM to run is Office and Edge which already run just fine on M1 Macs. I need to be able to run native Project Pro on windows and I can't do that in ARM.

It’s useful for checking if files done on Office on the Mac are identical and work properly on the Win version.

 

[autostadt2000]

I've been using an evaluation dev build of Win 11 Pro on my M1 14 since August for Paralells. So this now makes a non-evaluation version of Windows 11 Pro available?

 

[sbarton]

Aside from a few niech applications I don't see how this benefits the mac community. Bootcamp on the whole was used as a stop-gap for the gap in AAA/good gaming titles on MacOS. This hardley fixes that.

 

[mikeyy00]

Can some kind soul explain to me whether native x86 Windows apps will work under Windows 11 for ARM? I've been keeping around my old x86 Mac with Parallels because I need to use TurboTax Business - and Intuit - shame on them - never even ported it to x86 macOS, much less the Mx based Macs. Every year around March I get the 'privilege' of buying TT for Business for Windows to do business taxes :-(

I guess what I'm asking is whether Microsoft has Rosetta-like emulation built into its ARM Windows that'll let x86 apps run on it? I don't need performance - entering taxes doesn't take a lot of CPU - but it has to work flawlessly. If it does, maybe I can finally retire my x86 Mac and move my Parallels license over to my Mx mac.

Yes, most x86 stuff works fine (as long as it doesn't need to install drivers i.e. License dongle/VPN software)

 

[mikeyy00]

Aside from a few niech applications I don't see how this benefits the mac community. Bootcamp on the whole was used as a stop-gap for the gap in AAA/good gaming titles on MacOS. This hardley fixes that.

Runs most DX11 or prior games for me just fine.. so, you're right, not as good as bootcamp.. but it still runs a bunch of stuff it has no business running.

To be clear, historically, running games within Parallels on an Intel mac was **** because 99% of Mac GPUs were Potato. But even on the stock M1 Air, you can run a shocking amount of >3 year old games just fine.

 

[mikeyy00]

It never ran reliable on my M1 MBP. It would work for a while then hang on startup, necessitating redoing the install. I finally decided it simply wasn’t worth the hassle.



It’s useful for checking if files done on Office on the Mac are identical and work properly on the Win version.

Yes, you can run Project on ARM.

Microsoft has their own translation layer in ARM windows that lets a LOT of x86/x64 apps "just work".

 

[mikeyy00]

Good to see official support. Maybe Bootcamp can return in the future.

Its on Apple to write drivers for Windows. I don't see them doing this.

 

[jcurwen]

I certainly hope that this move by Microsoft (MS) leads to the availability of MS Flight Simulator 2020 (MSFS) to be enjoyed at a high performance level on an M2 Mac. I too am a bit confused by the MS announcement. Hope to see test reviews of MSFS on an M2 Mac with Windows 11 via Parallels, soon.

 

[bradl]

I certainly hope that this move by Microsoft (MS) leads to the availability of MS Flight Simulator 2020 (MSFS) to be enjoyed at a high performance level on an M2 Mac. I too am a bit confused by the MS announcement. Hope to see test reviews of MSFS on an M2 Mac with Windows 11 via Parallels, soon.

MSFS does require DirectX 11, which should be okay, but you'll also need additional drivers for any peripherals needed to fly the aircrafts. If those are not ready to be natively supported in ARM, you may be limited in functionality due to the emulation layer needed for x64.

There are a few ATC clients I use that I just inquired about for compatibility, but as they are processor agnostic and written in .NET and C#, they are already compatible, so I'm seriously considering this.

What I wonder is if I remember reading right, Windows 11 requires TPM for it to boot. How does Parallels accommodate that?

BL.

 

[BobSc]

Aside from a few niech applications I don't see how this benefits the mac community. Bootcamp on the whole was used as a stop-gap for the gap in AAA/good gaming titles on MacOS. This hardley fixes that.

Do you have any idea of how many applications there are that only run on a PC and that are needed by Mac users? Forget about gaming for a minutes. There are many many people who are not game-centric and and actually need a computer for non gaming purposes. I need to run two programs that are only available on a PC. I have no desire to buy a PC just for these programs when it costs much less for a subscription to Paralells for many years and doesn't take up any extra space. Gamers need to be aware that there is life beyond gaming.

 

[KPOM]

MSFS does require DirectX 11, which should be okay, but you'll also need additional drivers for any peripherals needed to fly the aircrafts. If those are not ready to be natively supported in ARM, you may be limited in functionality due to the emulation layer needed for x64.

There are a few ATC clients I use that I just inquired about for compatibility, but as they are processor agnostic and written in .NET and C#, they are already compatible, so I'm seriously considering this.

What I wonder is if I remember reading right, Windows 11 requires TPM for it to boot. How does Parallels accommodate that?

BL.

Parallels includes a software simulated TPM.

 

[mikeyy00]

Does virtualized Windows on Apple Silicon run faster than native Windows on Qualcomm?

Yes

 

[mikeyy00]

I certainly hope that this move by Microsoft (MS) leads to the availability of MS Flight Simulator 2020 (MSFS) to be enjoyed at a high performance level on an M2 Mac. I too am a bit confused by the MS announcement. Hope to see test reviews of MSFS on an M2 Mac with Windows 11 via Parallels, soon.

Won't happen. Metal is missing the bits needed to translate DX12 games.

 

[bradl]

Won't happen. Metal is missing the bits needed to translate DX12 games.

MSFS doesn't require DX12.

BL.

 

[GuilleA]

Parallels is a money-sucking piece of garbage. Just go with VMware, or for something even cooler an fully native use UTM.

 

[PauloSera]

Let’s go! About time we got official support. Glad to see Microsoft has finally opened up.

Now a Mac Studio looks really, REALLY tempting for my needs…

Yeah but who tf wants to run Windows 11. It's a disaster. I will never let go of Windows 10.

 

[name99]

This is pretty nice, but until we see Boot Camp make a come back, modern Macs don’t have the same utility for a lot of people as the old Intel ones.

Based on WHAT?
List significant ways in which it's important for most users to be running Windows ARM natively rather than in a VM.
In your answer, please bear in mind that most of the remote software you use ALL THE TIME runs in VMs, and apparently does so just fine...

 

[zap2]

We're in our 3rd year of Apple Silicon and no Bootcamp in sight.

Given what we know and have seen, I don’t see how you’d expect anything else.

Compared to virtualPC of my childhood, this is 100% better. No need to let good be the enemy of great here.

 

[name99]

Wonderful. Apple - the ball is in your court now, can we finally have full support for nested virtualization on Apple Silicon? Pretty please?

No-one claims that nested virtualization support is present in M1 hardware.

In THEORY it appears to be present in M2 hardware (as in, for example, certain hardware registers required for it are present on M2). However it is also the case that, as of right now, Apple have not updated their Virtualization framework to support nesting.
And as far as I know Apple have made no claims or promises either way.

This may just mean they haven't got round to it yet. (Plenty of the more finicky and esoteric issues, things like booting off external hard drives, only arrived, or at least were reliable, on M1 after a year or so.)
Or it may mean that the implementation for M2 was to some extent an experiment, never meant to be publicized as a feature, but simply there to allow the engineers a first draft of a variety of technologies they knew would probably demonstrate a few bugs in that first release?

 

[zap2]

Yeah but who tf wants to run Windows 11. It's a disaster. I will never let go of Windows 10.

Let’s check on this post in 3 years. A decade of support is more than reasonable, given that Windows 10 launched in 2015 and its 2023, 8 years is rather old.

 

[name99]

Its on Apple to write drivers for Windows. I don't see them doing this.

That's not how it works.
Apple writes drivers not for Windows but for an abstract machine based on a standard called VIRTIO.
It's up to Windows (or Linux or any other client) to make sure that they support the VIRTIO versions of various drivers.
As of right now Apple provides 8 VIRTIO drivers:

• memory balloon, handling requests for additional memory,
• block (storage), providing dedicated storage for the guest,
• file system, for storage shared between the guest and host,
• network, to access network interfaces, available as either bridged or NAT attachments,
• entropy, for random number generation,
• console, for serial communications,
• socket, for shared sockets with the host,
• sound, for audio.

They also provide three drivers for which a standard does not exist

• input, as keyboard and pointing devices,
• Spice agent, to support a shared clipboard,
• Mac graphics and display, including Metal and GPU support.

My understanding (correct me if I'm wrong) is that it's up to the hypervisor (Parallels, UTM, or whatever) to bridge between these three and whatever Windows wants, presumably by creating a fake Windows driver that takes in Windows calls and translates them to the API of these three drivers.

Now this does not handle the weirdness of every bizarre piece of Windows hardware which all seem to insist that along with using standard USB or Bluetooth or whatever, they just have to include some special (almost always BS feature) that's only accessible via their magic driver. It's an idiotic pathology of Windows that, thank god, Apple does not suffer from (with the consequent directly full of poorly written random drivers that are constantly doing god knows what to your system) and no-one sane should be bemoaning the fact that these aren't available via the virtual machine.

 

[name99]

Aside from a few niech applications I don't see how this benefits the mac community. Bootcamp on the whole was used as a stop-gap for the gap in AAA/good gaming titles on MacOS. This hardley fixes that.

The mac community != the gaming community.

Is this really that hard to understand?

 

[Realityck]

The mac community != the gaming community.

Is this really that hard to understand?

Even if it isn't equal to, there are a lot of people that would use those comparisons to determine how useable is playing some gaming content on Parallels, VMware or UTM on a AS Mac using ARM Windows 11 Pro aside from the usual business applications being run.

Given the processing speed of AS SoC's and how useable the intel apps running under Rosetta2 , it be nice for all us to see how far we have come with latest VMs.

 

[CosmoCopus]

Doesn’t boot camp offer better performance than a virtual machine like Parallels or VMware?