Windows Limits on Apple Silicon?

[SB1500]

I'm hoping that I get a software development apprenticeship at the company I work at. I thought it'd be amazing in terms of studying and trying things / doing work on my own personal Mac (beautiful display, swipe between macOS, nice keyboard I'm proficient on and all that).

I know we can still run Windows through Parallels etc, but it's an ARM version of Windows. And from what I understand, it's not like ARM macOS which lets you run x86 / older programmes as if they were native with very little compromise.

But how does that fare when it comes to Microsoft's Windows development programmes / alternatives to Xcode and the endless list of software I'll soon need to get to grips with (which is unknown to me as of yet)? Can I do this on my Mac or is it going to be severely limited and just not worth the hassle?

Ps, I'll have an actual work laptop where I do actual work for security reasons and that'll never change. But I'm thinking for the outside of work / learning phase and ongoing personal growth in terms of learning more and experimenting with things in the pursuit of learning.

 

[Technerd108]

I'm hoping that I get a software development apprenticeship at the company I work at. I thought it'd be amazing in terms of studying and trying things / doing work on my own personal Mac (beautiful display, swipe between macOS, nice keyboard I'm proficient on and all that).

I know we can still run Windows through Parallels etc, but it's an ARM version of Windows. And from what I understand, it's not like ARM macOS which lets you run x86 / older programmes as if they were native with very little compromise.

But how does that fare when it comes to Microsoft's Windows development programmes / alternatives to Xcode and the endless list of software I'll soon need to get to grips with (which is unknown to me as of yet)? Can I do this on my Mac or is it going to be severely limited and just not worth the hassle?

Ps, I'll have an actual work laptop where I do actual work for security reasons and that'll never change. But I'm thinking for the outside of work / learning phase and ongoing personal growth in terms of learning more and experimenting with things in the pursuit of learning.

I would recommend saving up to buy a personal PC. Maybe you can find a good used recent laptop on ebay or Swappa. I just sold a recent Lenovo 7i 14" for around $500 with a 12th gen Intel i7 and 16gb ram. It is a little bit of a risk buying used but it might help you get a cheap personal PC you can use for development.

As it has been stated on these forums by many people ARM Windows is very limited in third party programs and I would imagine that developer tools might be limited too and would function differently than on x86. Emulation will be slow unless you have a really fast Mac and even then it will probably be worse than an 10th gen i3 with 4gb ram?

Alternatively beyond getting a used PC you can often find deals on BestBuy on PC laptops that have pretty decent hardware. For $600 and up you can find a decent laptop if you time it right. Again you may have a very limited budget but if it is to help your career it might be a worthwhile investment.

Hopefully someone more knowledgeable than me can properly answer your question.

 

[tinygoblin]

Technerd108 is correct. Don't waste you time playing with Apple ARM products. Windows is the past and the future. You can always switch once you gain dev skill. If you really want a Mac laptop that will not limit your Windows experience, get yourself a used maxed-out 2020 16-inch MBP (the one with AMD Radeon Pro 5600M). Also you should remember you can never rely on any recent Apple laptop because of faulty TPS62180 chip: once it fails you loose all your SSD data without an option to recover it (proofs one and two). So please don't waste your time and money, these products are here just to make the stock price go up. You can't rely on Apple computer anymore. You can't buy time.

 

[Phil A.]

Visual Studio is Arm native now on Windows and works perfectly fine. I normally use Rider on MacOS for dotnet 6 dev work but have some customers still using dotnet framework apps and windows via parallels works perfectly fine for supporting / enhancing them. The only app I use regularly on windows is Visio (which is x64) and it starts instantly and works perfectly and in coherence mode it’s pretty seamless

 

[maflynn]

Technerd108 is correct. Don't waste you time playing with Apple ARM products.

While many people want to get windows running on a Mac, and many folks are successful, I'm a bit of a doubting Thomas. I ran into many headaches where software, utilities, and games just wouldn't work running windows within Parallels. The biggest headache was my company's VPN. Even when they provided an ARM version of the vpn, it just would not work. Some of my older (non-DX12) games would not work.

I have the luxury of having a PC as a desktop, but when I travel, I wanted to take the MBP, but sadly, I couldn't do my work stuff, nor my play stuff. The M1 MBP is a great laptop, don't get me wrong, but I say all of the time, get the right tool for the job. To me it felt like forcing a square plug into a round hole - at least for my needs.