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Parallels Desktop 17 ensures that Windows 11 recognizes Secure Boot and the virtual TPM 2.0 chip. In some ways, using Windows 11 on M1 Macs with Parallels Desktop is almost like running Windows 11 on an unsupported PC: It works fine for now and the virtual TPM 2.0 chip support in Parallels Desktop 17 makes Windows 11 believe that you’re running the OS on a supported PC, though there’s no guarantee that this will always be the case.

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Microsoft still isn’t selling Windows 10 or Windows 11 on ARM to consumers, so Parallels Desktop for Mac users are pretty much forced to run unlicensed Insider Preview versions of these operating systems. Thanks to Parallels Desktop 17, Windows 11 on ARM runs great on M1 Macs, there’s no question about it, though it’s important to keep in mind that this isn’t an officially supported scenario. Microsoft doesn’t officially support Windows 11 on M1 Macs Coherence Mode brings Windows apps and the Windows 11 Start Menu on the macOS desktop. When in Coherence mode, you can even access the Windows 11 Start Menu from the macOS dock to quickly launch Windows apps right from your Mac. This is especially important when the Windows version of an app has more features than its Mac counterpart.

You would imagine that there would be a significant performance cost, but a competitive multiplayer game like Overwatch runs just fine on an M1 Mac.įor me, Parallels Desktop’s killer feature remains Coherence Mode, which lets you completely hide the Windows VM and run Mac and Windows apps side by side on your main Mac desktop.

Parallels Desktop improves the situation significantly for Mac gamers, and it’s quite fascinating to see Win32 games being emulated on Windows 11 on ARM, all running in a virtual machine on a Mac. Macs have never been great for gaming, and the situation has gotten worse after Apple dropped support for all 32-bit apps and games with macOS Big Sur. However, most DirectX11 games that don’t require a specific GPU should work just fine, as explained in the video below. Playing games isn’t a great scenario, though, as Parallels Desktop 17 doesn’t support DirectX12. Running Windows 11 on ARM on an M1 Mac via Parallels Desktop feels like a no-compromises experience, and Windows 11 really improved compatibility and performance with Windows apps that have yet to be recompiled for the ARM64 architecture. You can activate Windows 11 on ARM with a regular Windows 11 key when the installation is done, though that’s not necessary.

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A recent Parallels Desktop update also enabled the new virtual TPM 2.0 chip by default to ensure that the minimum requirements for Windows 11 are met.

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Once you’ve downloaded a Windows 11 on ARM ISO from Microsoft’s website, installing Windows 11 on an M1 Mac is pretty straightforward.

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It’s still possible to manually choose your CPU and memory settings, but Parallels Desktop also offers different profiles (Productivity, Software testing, Gaming, etc.) with optimized settings. Windows 11 requires a two-core CPU and a minimum of 4GB of RAM, and Parallels Desktop can automatically choose the amount of RAM and CPU cores your Windows 11 VM needs. Windows 11 on ARM pretty much flies on the M1 Mac Mini I have which has 16GB of unified memory. What it’s like to run Windows 11 on an M1 Mac So far, the company did a very good job, but some important questions still remain. With Apple still in the process of transitioning its whole Mac line to Apple Silicon throughout 2022, Parallels had no choice but to optimize its software for Apple Silicon Macs and ARM versions of Windows.

Over the past couple of weeks, I’ve been using Parallels Desktop 17 for Mac to run Windows 11 on ARM on an M1-based Mac Mini, and the experience has been pretty seamless so far.

Parallels Desktop 17, the latest version of the app released earlier this summer was a cornerstone release, bringing support for Windows 11 on both Intel and M1-based Macs. This is where virtualization software like Parallels Desktop for Mac comes to the rescue.

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As for Apple’s new M1-based Macs, Boot Camp is not supported at all on these machines, so you can’t install Windows 11 on ARM or even Windows 10 on ARM on a separate partition. If you were planning to use Apple’s Boot Camp tool to install Windows 11 on a separate partition on your Mac, you’re out of luck: Windows 11 isn’t supported on Intel-based Macs, as these machines don’t have the TPM 2.0 security chip and Secure Boot feature that the OS requires.

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