Apple made a bold move in 2020, announcing their Macs’ transition from Intel x86 processors to in-house ARM-based silicon. The company went ahead to seal the deal by launching its first-ever chip, M1, powering its Macs, a hallmark announcement that set the company in an official transitional phase.
M1 macs brought major improvements to Apple’s laptops, and the first devices were praised in part due to the massive performance leaps. Rosetta technology also solved many of the perceivable issues that could have raised due to the landmarking changes. It has made it easy to run native Intel apps on Apple silicon macs without native support, which has helped users have a seamless transition.
But the major thing that has been lacking, at least to date, is the support for running Windows 10 on Apple Silicon. The major bottleneck has been Microsoft’s Windows 10 licensing policy on ARM, according to Craig Federighi, Apple’s Senior Vice President of Software Engineering.
But even without Boot Camp, a handy utility that Mac owners use to run Windows 10 on their devices, Parallels, a company that makes it easy to run software across multiple platforms, has made it possible to do so.
In its latest Parallels Desktop update, version 16.5, for Mac, the company has officially added support for running the virtual machine (VM) of Windows 10. The catch is, you need to use the ARM version of Windows 10, which is currently only available as an Insider Preview. As a plus, it’s also possible to run ARM-based Linux distributions.
According to the company, running Windows 10 virtual machine (VM) with Parallels Desktop on Mac is supposedly fast thanks to the commendable performance of M1 chips. x86 applications run just as fast, and even games like Rocket League, Among Us, Roblox, and The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim run smoothly.
Other perks include the so-called coherence mode, which runs Windows apps on Mac as if they were native applications. There’s also easy file transfer from Mac to VM, and the ability to use and even customize touch bar controls is available.
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