iPhones Can Now Run Windows 11, Albeit With Abysmal Performance

Recently, Apple greenlit a new emulator app called UTM SE, and this naturally attracted a lot of tinkerers to see how everything runs on the iPhone, which is by no means slow by today’s standards. One such attempt involves Windows 11, but before you get too excited about the prospects of having a literal Windows PC in your pocket, the performance can be best described as “TERRIBLY slow.”

Windows 11 In iPhone 15 Pro

Behold, probably the very first instance of Windows 11 (in form of tiny11 core) on UTM SE.
It is TERRIBLY slow, booting in about 20 minutes, but nonetheless, it's still Windows 11 on an iPhone 15 Pro! pic.twitter.com/Iyr5Txy8uh

— NTDEV (@NTDEV_) July 20, 2024

This is demonstrated by @NTDEV_ on X (Twitter), which is also responsible for Tiny11, an ultra-downsized version of Microsoft’s operating system designed to run within the most restrictive hardware. However, running the Tiny11 Core variant of Windows in iPhone 15 Pro (via UTM SE emulator) is no small feat, in no less part due to its extremely slow performance. Booting takes a whopping 20 minutes (while your regular laptop takes no more than 20 seconds), so running anything else is certainly a challenge.

The reason for its huge performance deficit is not technically due to iPhone 15’s hardware, however. In fact, Apple is highly restrictive on what emulators is allowed to run on its hardware (it used to be a blanket ban on emulators before EU’s DMA laws likely forced Apple to allow emulation in some forms). For one, JIT (just-in-time) compilers, crucial for emulation performance, is prohibited for security reasons. UTM had to develop a variant of the emulator without JIT compiler in order to be approved by App Store.

Of course, the virtual machine that powers the Windows 11 system doesn’t help with performance either: based on the screenshots, the virtual machine is powered by a single-core 1GHz CPU and 2GB RAM – neither of which qualify past Windows 11’s minimum system requirements today. (Though Tiny11 can technically fit into systems with just 200MB of RAM.)

Simply put, while you can technically run Windows in your iPhone, you probably wouldn’t want to. If you really want Windows on an Apple device, perhaps a Macbook fits that bill.

Source: Tom’s Hardware

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