Microsoft Now Supports Windows 11 on Arm on Apple Silicon Macs
- Paul Thurrott
- Feb 16, 2023
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Microsoft revealed that it now supports running Windows 11 in a virtual machine using Parallels Desktop on Apple Silicon-based Macs. And I think it revealed the reason this support was so long in the making, too.
“Windows 11 runs best on a PC designed for Windows,” Microsoft notes. “When such an option is not available, here are two different ways to use Windows with Mac.”
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The first is streaming a Windows 11 Cloud PC to the Mac using Windows 365, of course. You can learn more about this option, and its pricing, on the Microsoft website. (It’s expensive.)
The second has been available since the introduction of the Apple M1 chipset and the resulting first generation of Apple Silicon-based Macs, albeit in somewhat unsupported form: you can run Windows 11 on Arm in a virtual machine using Parallels Desktop. Originally, you needed to install a Windows Insider Preview build and keep it up to date. But now this option is officially supported. “Parallels Desktop version 18 is an authorized solution for running Arm versions of Windows 11 Pro and Windows 11 Enterprise in a virtual environment on its platform on Apple M1 and M2 computers,” Microsoft notes.
So there’s the first caveat: the least expensive option, Windows 11 Home, is not supported. But Microsoft also revealed that some Windows 11 features will not work in this configuration because they use their own forms of virtualization: features like Windows Subsystem for Android, Windows Subsystem for Linux, Windows Sandbox, and Virtualization-based Security are not supported.
And some other experiences, like DirectX 12, are likewise not supported. Also not supported: 32-bit Arm apps from the Microsoft Store. “32-bit Arm apps are in the process of being deprecated for all Arm versions of Windows,” Microsoft adds. “The preferred customer experience is to run 64-bit Arm apps, but customers can also use apps in x64 or x86 emulation on Mac M1 and M2 computers.”
These issues, I think, might help explain why Microsoft wouldn’t officially support Windows 11 on Apple Silicon Macs for so long. But at least that support has finally arrived.