Windows 11 on a 2019 MBP is it possible?

[MacCraig Pro]

As per the question really.

I have a 2019 MacBook Pro with the Touch Bar. It currently dual boots Sequoia and Windows 10, but would like it to run Windows 11.

The internet seems to be full of suggestions, but none really seem to work, especially as I need an F10 key during a full install apparently or there's a choice of downloading some half baked spyware that may or may not be able to install W11.

Suggestions.

 

[Snowlover]

Use Rufus to make a windows 11 install usb that bypasses w11 requirements (on your win 10).
Use it to update win 10 to win 11, or clean install win 11.

Use Rufus to Create a Windows 11 Install disk that bypasses TPM, Secure Boot requirements (How-to).

This guide shows how to use RUFUS to create a Windows 11 install disk on a USB, to bypass the TPM, Secure Boot and Microsoft Account requirements to setup Windo

www.wintips.org

 

[MacCraig Pro]

Sadly. making a USB drive via Rufus still causes the dreaded this PC isn't supported message due to the lack of TPM.

Seems I cannot get this thing to upgrade at all no matter what I try.

Use Rufus to make a windows 11 install usb that bypasses w11 requirements (on your win 10).
Use it to update win 10 to win 11, or clean install win 11.

Use Rufus to Create a Windows 11 Install disk that bypasses TPM, Secure Boot requirements (How-to).

This guide shows how to use RUFUS to create a Windows 11 install disk on a USB, to bypass the TPM, Secure Boot and Microsoft Account requirements to setup Windo

www.wintips.org

 

[Grumpus]

Sadly. making a USB drive via Rufus still causes the dreaded this PC isn't supported message due to the lack of TPM.

There are a couple of things you can try (after backing your win10 system up, of course).

Win11 24H2 requires more workarounds to bypass the checks and these will be included in the next release of rufus. If you don't want to wait, rufus' author has provided them here. You would run those commands in an elevated cmd window on win10, then double-click setup.exe on the rufus usb stick to start the upgrade.

An alternate approach is to double-click the win11 iso to mount it, and then open an elevated cmd window and navigate to the mounted iso. Type setup.exe /product server. This bypasses the checks. It doesn't actually turn it into a server, but may have the unwanted side-effect of preventing future feature updates.

If you've ever set the Target Feature Update Version, you should probably turn that off before trying either of the above methods [although, some have reported being offered the upgrade to win11 24H2 by windows update after setting the target version to Windows 11 24H2 - that didn't work for me].

I used the second method to upgrade a 'windows to go' win11 23H2 on a 2019 MBA to win11 24H2 (after unsetting the portable os registry entry). That worked fine, but I haven't had occasion to do the jump from win10 to win11 24H2, so YMMV.

 

[MacPeasant123]

As per the question really.

I have a 2019 MacBook Pro with the Touch Bar. It currently dual boots Sequoia and Windows 10, but would like it to run Windows 11.

The internet seems to be full of suggestions, but none really seem to work, especially as I need an F10 key during a full install apparently or there's a choice of downloading some half baked spyware that may or may not be able to install W11.

Suggestions.

The other day I successfully installed Windows 11 Pro on my 2020 Intel MacBook Pro with the Touch Bar, so if that works, it should also work on your 2019 model.

For the way I got it working, you'll need a USB-A keyboard and mouse (the USB-A keyboard would allow you to hit the F10 key), and I followed this video, which has you manually creating a partition on your Mac SSD drive, get Boot Camp drivers on a USB drive, and do a fresh Windows 11 install on that partition. I assume this would wipe out all your Windows 10 data, so save all your data into some external drive before you do what this video says:

How to install Windows 11 on a Mac without using BootCamp | 2025 | Intel Mac
Mz Learning
Feb 8, 2025

This video uses WinDiskWriter and macOS wouldn't run it, and I had to go into System Settings to allow it to run. This page talks about it, although the messages I saw were somewhat different:

noob: how do I actually run the program? · Issue #4 · TechUnRestricted/WinDiskWriter

hi, apologies but downloading the zip file I can't for the life of me figure out how to run the software. apologies on the noob question. thanks Nock

github.com

The procedure in this video got Windows 11 Pro installed on my Mac, when several others that has me first installing Win 10 didn't work. With those I always got stuck at 48% during the Win 11 install and I couldn't get any further, despite going into the command line to type stuff.

The only thing from this video that didn't work for me was the very end: running Apple Boot Camp drivers didn't install them in Win 11 for me. Thus no wifi, no sound, no bluetooth, etc.

----

To get the drivers workings took a bit more extra work for me, and here's what I did.

1) I copied the Apple Boot Camp drivers from the USB drive to my Windows 11 Pro desktop

2) then I went into the subfolders (under both the "BootCamp" and "$WinPEDriver$" folders) and found all the Broadcom folders (looking for the one that controls the wifi chip), and I found every file type called "Setup Information", right-clicked them to bring up the context menu, and then chose "Install" (which also has a down arrow before the word "Install"). I suppose the "BroadcomWirelessUDM" folder was the right one, but I did this with all Broadcom folders I could find.

3) Eventually I got the right one for the wifi driver, as I saw that wifi was available in the bottom right corner at some point.

4) Then I hopped onto my home wifi network, did Windows Update to get some other drivers working.

5) Some drivers were still not working, especially the Touch Bar. What I did from here was to go to the Windows search bar and type in:

Device Manager

and then opened it.

6) in Device Manager, I expanded every component. I right-clicked every one of them that looked like it wasn't working or I suspected wasn't working.

I would chose "Update Driver" and when it asked me where to look for drivers, I picked "Browse my computer for drivers" and chose the Boot Camp folder I copied to the Desktop back in step #2. Then it will look in there and install the Apple driver for the component that isn't working.

For example, in Device Manager, under "Human Interface Devices" --> Apple Touch Bar, I right clicked that, chose Update driver, picked the Boot Camp folder from earlier, and it was installed! For some of these, you have to restart Windows for it to finish and run.

I repeated #6 for every component, got them all working, did Windows Update, and then did Apple Software Update a few times to get everything fully updated. In the end Boot Camp was on version 6.1.19, which updates the Precision Touchpad driver:

Apple's Boot Camp Gains Precision Touchpad Driver Update and Bug Fixes

Apple today released an updated version of Boot Camp, the software that allows the Windows operating system to be run on Intel-based Macs. Boot Camp...

www.macrumors.com