On top of that, one must factor in the cost of Windows itself. A new subscription will set a user back £69.99 per year, or a perpetual licence can be picked up for £79.99. For the majority who need it for that one weird app (apparently Excel), improvements in Coherence mode (where an app runs seamlessly on the Mac desktop rather than in a VM window) and other tweaks around functionality (such as drag and drop) will similarly be handy.Īway from Windows, Linux continues to be supported and audio and video improvements will please Penguinistas (although as with Windows, the user is limited to a subset of distributions when running on M1 hardware) and macOS Monterey is supported as both a host and guest operating system. On M1, Windows is running a lot faster than on Windows-specific hardware.Īs for the target market, Parallels told us that a significant portion of customers use the software to play Windows games on their Macs, and the new release shouldn't disappoint. Parallels was a little coy on the subject. Performance of the relatively weedy 8GB M1 Mac Mini was nearly double that of the Surface Pro X in single core, and a good 1.5x faster for multi core.

To torture the hardware, emulation and virtualization, we fired up Sea of Thieves and were delighted to find it vaguely playable on the M1 Mac (Parallels recommends a 16GB Mac for gaming, we only had 8GB) even if the results of the experiment won't cause our dedicated gaming rig any sleepless nights.Īlthough some of the benchmarks we ran might cause some tossing and turning for users of Microsoft's flagship Arm-based kit. Native Windows on Arm apps flew along and even Intel apps behaved well. Our experience was that, subjectively, it was all simply a lot snappier. Parallels will cheerfully trot out stats claiming the startup time of Windows 11 is 33 per cent up on Windows 10 on Arm with a 20 per cent disk performance boost. The answer is very well, particularly considering the absence of Intel hardware. Windows comes to Apple M1 silicon as Parallels delivers native desktop hypervisorįor now, The Reg took the software for a spin on an 8GB M1 Mac Mini to see how the Windows Insider Preview of Windows 11 on Arm ran.

VMware is 'a few months away' from M1 release of Fusion macOS desktop hypervisor.

India’s massive COVID-19 wave slows VMware desktop hypervisor development.

Wine 6.0.1: For that one weird app on that one weird Mac.

Who knows, perhaps Microsoft might listen (probably not).

Parallels desktop 16 for mac m1