There's No Windows for Arm Macs Yet Because Microsoft Has Secret Exclusivity Deal With Qualcomm

[jlc1978]

...as opposed to multiple points of failure if your local hard drive fails, your server room floods, someone installs a virus... It's 2021

My point is with the cloud, if it goes down you're SOL unless you have a robust COP plan. A single point of failure, however unlikely, is a concern that needs to be addressed and not just assume beacuse it's "in the cloud" it will always be there when you need it.

As cloud based services grow they become a potentially lucrative target for bad actors.

and if the internet goes down, everything grinds to a halt anyway.

To a certain point. A lot can still get done the old fashioned way; you just need to be prepared to do it.

Unless an enterprise has a very professionally-run and properly funded infrastructure where everybody follows backup and security protocols and everything is set up with multiple redundancy and proper server-grade hardware, a good cloud service (with quality-of-service guarantees in the contract) will probably be more reliable.

QOS means nothing if it does go down. Granted, you need the right hardware, software and plan to deal with an outage. When I ran a service that relied on cloud based products I had a backup plan that bypassed it completely as a backup; and when we had issues the backup worked just fine until teh issues were fixed. Planning for problems is tehkey, no matter how your infrastructure is setup.

Your cheap personal home version may be a bit more wonky.

No doubt.

On the other hand, the companies running the service will get a nice steady subscription income, and the hardware makers can sell them nice profitable maintenance contracts...

True, nut the PC market may see a shift, sperate from the server market. Big copmanies will be much better placed to weather it than one focused on desktops and laptops.

and, anyway, as we've seen with the latest iPhones, as the technology matures it's getting harder to come up with compelling upgrades every year.

Very true.

I think that the iPhone/iPad have already taken Apple further in "the enterprise" than the Mac ever did.

Agreed, the question is can Apple use the cloud to better penerate the enterprise with Macs?

 

[Yebubbleman]

This explanation, at least, makes sense. Given that ARM64 is much more of a Microsoft-friendly architecture than PowerPC ever was (hence requiring emulation over virtualization). I've said it before and I'll say it again, both Microsoft and Apple stand to benefit immensely over getting Windows for ARM64 running (officially) on Apple Silicon Macs (be it via Virtualization or direct boot).

 

[jlc1978]

I've said it before and I'll say it again, both Microsoft and Apple stand to benefit immensely over getting Windows for ARM64 running (officially) on Apple Silicon Macs (be it via Virtualization or direct boot).

what benefit do you see for MS? I can see Apple getting some marginal sakes but I don’t see how MS will benefit vs. Windows 365 Cloud PC.

 

[chucker23n1]

Given that ARM64 is much more of a Microsoft-friendly architecture than PowerPC ever was (hence requiring emulation over virtualization).

Windows for a time ran natively on PowerPC. If that were a setup Microsoft was interested in, they'd do that.

(Heck, they did do that again, a decade later, with the Xbox 360.)

I don't see what makes ARM "more Microsoft-friendly than PowerPC".

what benefit do you see for MS? I can see Apple getting some marginal sakes but I don’t see how MS will benefit vs. Windows 365 Cloud PC.

Less dependency from Intel and AMD, more competitive offerings for their Surface line-up. But not any time soon.

 

[Yebubbleman]

Windows for a time ran natively on PowerPC. If that were a setup Microsoft was interested in, they'd do that.

(Heck, they did do that again, a decade later, with the Xbox 360.)

I don't see what makes ARM "more Microsoft-friendly than PowerPC".

Because they are actively developing an OS for that architecture, whereas they currently aren't developing for PowerPC and, really only did it for PowerPC with Windows NT 4.0 and the XBox 360.

 

[jlc1978]

Less dependency from Intel and AMD, more competitive offerings for their Surface line-up.

I could see that if they made a version that ran on a generic ARM chip ,but developing an ARM version of Windows that runs well on AS limits them to one specific design vs more readily available one that OEMs can use to build ARM devices that run Windows.

But not any time soon.

I agree. At best I see a situation where MS decides to support a generic ARM build and thus opens a way for Windows on AS with a VM.

 

[MallardDuck]

I could see that if they made a version that ran on a generic ARM chip ,but developing an ARM version of Windows that runs well on AS limits them to one specific design vs more readily available one that OEMs can use to build ARM devices that run Windows.



I agree. At best I see a situation where MS decides to support a generic ARM build and thus opens a way for Windows on AS with a VM.

I'd settle for 'let you buy a license to run on any hardware even if we don't support it'. That'd let fusion and parallels really provide real support.

 

[icedeocampo]

nope
might be a reason, but its not the reason
MS has become data collection company lately, and worst than google on it. why do you think win11 doesnt work without a MS account? they don't want you to use some apps as secondary OS on a mac. now money made that way. they want you to use this as your primary OS, collect data, sell ads and so on.

Do a quick search - it does work without an MS-Account.

 

[SeoulBigChris]

I run mostly Microchip Studio, which is a bunch of crap layered on top of VS, all of which is running under x86 emulation.

I just now installed Parallels 17 and Windows 11 for ARM precisely for this very reason. While I was able to install Visual Studio (just as a test), VS warned me it would be slow and might not even work. I couldn't successfully install Microchip Studio at all, when it hit me that Microchip doesn't have an ARM version. I Googled to see if anyone else is doing this, and found your post. I know how to run x86 programs in MacOS. I don't know how to run x86 Windows programs in Parallels. Could you elaborate and/or show me a link explaining the process? Thanks.

 

[nsayer]

I just now installed Parallels 17 and Windows 11 for ARM precisely for this very reason. While I was able to install Visual Studio (just as a test), VS warned me it would be slow and might not even work. I couldn't successfully install Microchip Studio at all, when it hit me that Microchip doesn't have an ARM version. I Googled to see if anyone else is doing this, and found your post. I know how to run x86 programs in MacOS. I don't know how to run x86 Windows programs in Parallels. Could you elaborate and/or show me a link explaining the process? Thanks.

There were no extra steps. I just installed Microchip Studio and it just magically worked. There is no extra step (like installing Rosetta 2) on Windows to emulate x86 binaries.

 

[SeoulBigChris]

There were no extra steps. I just installed Microchip Studio and it just magically worked. There is no extra step (like installing Rosetta 2) on Windows to emulate x86 binaries.

Hmm, okay. I’ll try again. I’ll admit the error log wasn’t very clear, so it’s possible the ARM architecture message I saw was just informational and not the error itself.

 

[SeoulBigChris]

Hmm, okay. I’ll try again. I’ll admit the error log wasn’t very clear, so it’s possible the ARM architecture message I saw was just informational and not the error itself.

Well, I’m case anyone else has the same experience, I finally got Microchip (Atmel) Studio 7 to install. I did two things differently, so unfortunately I can’t say which one did the trick.

(1) I deleted my Windows 11 virtual machine, and made a new one using the built-in Parallels option (before I had downloaded the Windows for ARM installer from Microsoft).

(2) I installed Microchip Studio immediately. Previously I had installed Microsoft Visual Studio first.

I almost gave up during installation. It took almost an hour to install, and initially I thought it had frozen. I was about to kill it, but got briefly distracted. When I returned, I saw it was actually making progress, not frozen. Patience may be required.

 

[ratkai]

When Will the arm qualcom deal empire that windows have. I want to run windows through bootcamp on m1 ultra chip.
when this Will be possible, do you think we can play HEAVY games, like flight simulator 2020?

 

[polyphenol]

When Will the arm qualcom deal empire that windows have. I want to run windows through bootcamp on m1 ultra chip.
when this Will be possible, do you think we can play HEAVY games, like flight simulator 2020?

I don't remember anyone saying that Bootcamp would be an option.

I have run Windows in Parallels on my Mac mini - and it was a reasonable experience. But only as a trial.

 

[leman]

When Will the arm qualcom deal empire that windows have. I want to run windows through bootcamp on m1 ultra chip.
when this Will be possible,

Most likely never. Too many technical and iP problems to overcome, too costly, too little interest from the product owners.

do you think we can play HEAVY games, like flight simulator 2020?

Did you try using virtualization?

 

[paulcons]

There will come a point in the next bunch of years that my beloved cMP will give up the ghost to the point I can't fix it... so what do I do? More so than when I was working, I spend time gaming, win10 running on my cMP is actually pretty good (have a flashed GTX980 GPU). Hackintosh may be the answer... and yeah I know it's days may be numbered as the fruit ties it's OS to their own SoC very tightly.

Saw an interesting video (

) about running multiple OSes on x86 hardware without the need for limited custom boot pickers or other software tricks to get it running. Think it may have had something to do with a type 1 bare metal hypervisor... about which I know zip. I'd love to hear from some of the guys that make this forum what it is about this scheme... rather then what seems a seriously hacky way to run win on a AS Mac, reverse it, run macOS on x86 hardware.

 

[jeffpeng]

Hackintosh may be the answer... and yeah I know it's days may be numbered as the fruit ties it's OS to their own SoC very tightly.

Frankly: if you consider that you can expect software updates for machines 7 years down the road after they stop selling a specific system, especially one as expensive as a Mac Pro, and then consider that you can expect another two years of critical system updates, and also can live with the fact that all the new bells and whistles will be tied to Apple Silicon .... Hackintosh actually sounds pretty okay to me.

A bigger issue is that also new hardware will have sketchy support at best. Yes, you can use 12th gen Intel CPUs with macOS using a CPUID hack, but you then can't use the iGPU for anything. And it's likely that the situation will get worse with new hardware. So, for example, is it likely that RDNA3 GPUs will not be supported by macOS at all.

Also.... new versions of Apps will at some point start to no longer include x86 versions. Much earlier than Apple will "vintage" the last MacPro.

I'd love to hear from some of the guys that make this forum what it is about this scheme... rather then what seems a seriously hacky way to run win on a AS Mac, reverse it, run macOS on x86 hardware.

I ran Windows and MacOS concurrently on one machine with a headless Linux KVM Hypervisor managing the two, and by sending a ssh command to the Hypervisor I could "switch" between both systems "relatively" seamless by suspending one VM, and then firing up the other from suspension.

The idea with hypervisors is that you have one layer that distributes system resources to another or multiple other operating systems running "below" it - or "supervised" - on the same hardware.

Now the beauty of virtualization is that you do not "emulate" another machine, but that you just hand of interrupts and code to the machine directly and lose (almost) no performance. Hence you can virtualize x86 on x86, and ARM on ARM, but you can't virtualize x86 on ARM or vice versa. Yes, you can emulate ARM on x86, but doing that on the fly (opposed to Rosetta which basically cross-compiles binaries before using for the most part) is dog slow. So once there is no more x86 version of macOS .... Hackintoshs, be it running on the hardware directly or via a hypervisor, are effectively dead. But as I said above: this still is half-a-decade-or-more away.

 

[MBPM1]

When Will the arm qualcom deal empire that windows have. I want to run windows through bootcamp on m1 ultra chip.
when this Will be possible, do you think we can play HEAVY games, like flight simulator 2020?

I have an M1 MBP and Parallels worked great with W11, but then one day, Parallels just quit working so I gave up and have stayed with MacOS....Like you, would love to have this option again without having to use Parallels.

 

[Vjosullivan]

I ran Windows and MacOS concurrently on one machine with a headless Linux KVM Hypervisor managing the two... I could "switch" between both systems "relatively" seamless...

That is the thing about Linux. Everything is relatively easy ... provided you have a relatively loose definition of easy.

 

[lepidotós]

I mean, I just installed Void on my iBook G4 and it wasn't really difficult, just time consuming thanks to my 560 kilobit (70 kilobyte) connection. Even with having to install xorg and MATE myself, it just worked out of the box. And then, distros generally package all you need anyway, Void is the hard way to be as unbloated as possible.
I also did it on my PowerBook G3 but that one has known issues with the 3D Rage LT Pro... I don't really blame Linux for that too much, the 3D Rage just wasn't a very good iGPU from experience with my Dell Optiplex.​

 

[jeffpeng]

That is the thing about Linux. Everything is relatively easy ... provided you have a relatively loose definition of easy.

Anything is easy once you know how to do it. And I would say the thing about Linux is that it actually lets you do pretty much anything - provided you know how.

 

[paulcons]

Seeing as how modern day gaming is almost completely pushed forward by the 2 big GPU makers, no matter how "wonderful," 64 cores of Metal bring nothing to the table as the fruit has 100% divorced themselves from that market. Unless, of course, the big game studios start writing to metal as they do Direct X and that won't happen (I assume y'all have seen what UE5 bring to that world?). I DO wonder if the makers of the very high end video & 3D professional software are going to go all in on metal? Even if they do, still leaves us all in the rain. A big beefy pc that I can keep expanding and upgrading as the years go by plus something like a mac-mini to do the stuff I feel more comfortable doing in macOS.