Microsoft Officially Allows Windows 11 On Apple Silicon Macbooks, But Only Through Parallels

If you’re waiting for Boot Camp – bad luck.

macOS users prior to Apple’s ARM switch have always had the option to boot into Windows through a feature called “Boot Camp” – which lets Windows runs on a hardware-level for minimum performance overhead. Since Macbooks transitioned into Apple’s in-house M-series SoCs though, that isn’t an option.

Up until now, those who use M1 or M2 Macs can run Windows 11 through a third party app called Parallels, which is a VM (virtual machine) that operates within its host system. In a support article, Microsoft has christened Parallels Desktop 18 as the software of choice to run the ARM versions of Windows 11 officially.

Of course, there’s a reason why Boot Camp exists. This ARM flavor of Windows 11 running on Macs will come with some fairly severe limitations – first up, 32-bit ARM apps are no-go: that part is on Microsoft as the company is phasing out 32-bit apps on ARM versions of Windows moving forward. Any external devices won’t work unless relevant Windows drivers are installed; you can’t run VM on top of VM (such as WSL, WSA, VBS); DirectX 12 or OpenGL 3.3 are just plain unsupported – so no games for you. Some performance overhead is a given, as the VM will have to fight against its host system for resources.

Alternatively, Microsoft offers its Windows 365 service which runs the OS on cloud, so you’re effectively remote-controlling a PC somewhere inside Microsoft’s servers. If your use case requires a native system – this may be your only option going forward.

Source: Engadget | Microsoft

Pokdepinion: I guess it makes sense now that Microsoft would much rather sell you a pay-monthly cloud service than a pay-once OS license after all.