This time it’s the right one. After several months of development, Parallels Desktop 16.5 is fully capable of virtualizing Windows 10 on Apple Silicon processors. Over 100,000 Mac M1 users have participated in the program technical preview and proven to work “Tens of thousands” Windows applications, starting with those of the Microsoft Office suite.
“The transition went smoothly for most applications thanks to Rosetta, but virtual machines are the exception”, says Nick Dobrovolskiy, Parallels vice president of engineering, “Parallels engineers had to support native virtualization on the M1 chip. “ The game was worth it: a Windows 10 virtual machine on a Mac M1 spins 30% faster than on a MacBook Pro Core i9 and consumes 2.5 times less than on a 2020 MacBook Air.
Be careful, however: since we are talking about virtualization, we are talking about Windows 10 for ARM, which is not sold, but can be downloaded on the Microsoft website. While the main applications seem stable, some compatibility issues cannot be ruled out. Parallels Desktop 16.5 also allows the use of the main GNU / Linux distributions on M1 Macs, as we were able to verify with Ubuntu 20.04 for ARM.
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