Microsoft Now Officially Supports Running Windows 11 on Apple Silicon Macs

Microsoft today published a support page(Opens in a new window) that shows how Mac users can run Windows 11 on their Apple silicon M1- and M2-powered Macs.

Previously, Alludo (the rebranded Corel) had announced the capability in its Parallels Desktop virtual machine software, but by publishing the options on its support page, Redmond officially acknowledges that the setup works and is approved.

Installing Windows directly on Macs using Apple’s Boot Camp feature is not an option unless your Mac has an Intel CPU, so it doesn’t work with M1- and M2-based Macs.

The support page details how to run Windows 11 on Apple silicon Macs. In general, there are two options: using Windows 365 Cloud PCs and using Parallels Desktop.

The first option is only available to business and enterprise customers, and is priced accordingly, with Windows 365 starting at $31 per user per month. With this option, the OS is running on Microsoft servers connected to your PC (or Mac or iPad) via superfast broadband. So it’s no surprise that this can run on M1 and M2 Macs. Purchasers of the service choose how many CPUs, and how much RAM and storage they want to pay for. This solution enables companies to easily manage fleets of devices.

(Credit: Microsoft)

For everyday individual users, the Parallels route makes the most sense. According to the newly published support page, “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.” Alludo also issued a press release(Opens in a new window) today about about using the software to run Windows 11 on Apple Silicon.

In this case, unlike Windows 365, the Windows OS is actually running on the Mac in a virtual machine. That’s why it’s the Windows on Arm version rather than the standard Windows 11. That means that it comes with limitations of that Arm version, including lack of some hardware drivers, apps—especially games and antivirus software—that don’t support the platform. Apps that customize Windows, such as “input method editors (IMEs), assistive technologies, and cloud storage apps” only work if they specifically support Windows 11 on Arm. Games that require DirectX 12 or OpenGL3.3 also won’t run.

You also won’t get a few of Windows 11’s spiffiest new features, including:

• Windows Subsystem for Android, which enables your Windows 11 device to run Android applications that are available in the Amazon Appstore.

• Windows Subsystem for Linux, which enables a GNU/Linux environment on Windows 11.

• Windows Sandbox, a lightweight desktop environment to safely run applications in isolation.

• Virtualization-based Security (VBS), which enables customers to create and isolate a secure region of memory from the normal operating system.

Finally, you won’t be able to run 32-bit Windows Arm apps on your Apple Silicon Mac, but those are in the process of being deprecated on all Windows platforms, so most people won’t run into this issue. Despite those severe restrictions, it’s still possible to play plenty of good games via Parallels(Opens in a new window) running Windows 11 on a current Mac.

(Credit: Parallels)

In my own experience using a Surface Pro X, which has an Arm CPU, the system is usable but occasionally flaky, and a good number of apps in the Microsoft Store are not compatible. That said, Microsoft is not neglecting its Windows on Arm flavor: The company made a big push toward the platform when it introduced Project Volterra, aka the Windows Dev Kit 2023 at its annual Build conference last spring. It’s a Mac mini-like desktop computer that sports a “Snapdragon 8cx Gen 3 Compute Platform and utilizing the Qualcomm Neural Processing SDK.”

Other virtualization software lets you run Windows on a Mac, but this Parallels option is the only one to receive Microsoft’s official blessing.