Unfortunately, I didn’t manage to get this to work properly and my VM was always stuck during the first boot in a “Getting Started” screen. If you are part of the Windows Insider program, there is a version available for download, using a VHDX file. The first thing we need is installation media for the ARM-based version of Windows 11. Getting Windows for ARM on your M1 device Step 1) Create a Windows 11 for ARM ISO Fortunately it is possible to run most 32-bit based Windows applications on the ARM-version of Windows, which are available for most applications out there.įor this article, I’ll be using a 2020 M1-based MacBook Air but this should work in the same way for an iMac, Mac Mini, MacBook Pro and even for the recently announced M1 Max and M1 Pro devices. Another negative is that there are very little applications compiled for running on an ARM-based Windows version. Microsoft decided that this is only available for sale for system builders. The downside for this approach is that there is no official way, currently, to get a license for an ARM-based version of Windows. Leaving only virtualization as a real option. As it’s using QEMU under the hood, it is capable of emulating different processor architectures (like x86-64) but it can do virtualization for the same as the host’s architecture as well.Īfter a quick test, on which I plan to create a more detailed article in the future, using emulation seems to cause a lot of overhead and turns out to be too slow to be usable currently. UTM offers QEMU-based virtaluzation and emulation with a handy GUI for both IOS and macOS. Virtualization is fast(er) but requires software written for the hardware platform it is running on.īoth of these methods can be accomplished with UTM ( ). Emulation offers maximum compatibility as it doesn’t require software written for ARM specifically but it’s pretty slow. Both methods have their advantages and disadvantages.

The second involves emulation, where we will translate instructions between the running operating system (Windows in this case) and the hardware. The first involves virtualization, as we can’t (yet) run Windows natively on an M1-based machine. As mentioned above, there are two options to get Windows running on an Apple M1-based device.

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