Nov 10, 2020 Apple’s “one more thing” event on November 10, 2020, revealed the first Mac computers powered by the Apple M1 chip. Parallels is excited to see the performance, power efficiency, and virtualization features that are brought to the Mac with the Apple M1 chip. The developers also note that, on a Mac sporting an Apple M1 chip, Parallels Desktop 16.5 uses 2.5x less energy than on a 2020 Intel-based MacBook Air. 'Apple's M1 chip is a significant breakthrough for Mac users,' said Nick Dobrovolskiy, Parallels Senior Vice President of Engineering and Support in a statement.

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The M1 Mac's inability to run Windows might seems like an obvious limitation, but it's actually a major issue for a lot of Mac users. Boot Camp is gone so you can't run Windows natively, which means you need to use a virtualization app. A few months ago, Parallels previewed its Parallels Desktop for Mac virtualization software on M1 Macs, and on Wednesday, the company annnounced thatParallels Desktop 16.5 for Mac—which brings full native support for both M1 and Intel Macs—is out of beta and now available to the general public.

If you want to run Windows on your M1 Mac, you can launch Parallels Desktop 16.5 to run the Windows 10 ARM Insider Preview, the only version of Windows that can run on Apple silicon. To get the Insider Preview, you need to register for Microsoft's Insider Program. Keep in mind that this is beta, so some features may not work, and it isn't optimized for performance.

Despite the lack of optimization on Microsoft's part, Parallels claims that performance of Windows 10 ARM is 30 percent better on an M1 Mac than Windows on an Intel Core i9 MacBook Pro, and DirectX performance is 60 percent better compared to a MacBook Pro with a Radeon Pro 555X GPU. And the M1 Mac uses 2.5 less energy than a 2020 Intel MacBook Air, the company says.

The major features that were in the version 16 release are fully available on M1 Macs, including Coherence Mode, Mac keyboard layouts, Shared Profiles, Touch Bar controls, and more. Parallels says that it hopes to add the ability to run macOS Big Sur in a virtual machine later this year.

Parallels Desktop 16.5 for Mac is $79.99 for a new subscription or $99.99 for a new perpetual license. An upgrade from Parallels Desktop 14 or 15 to a perpetual license is $49.99.

If you miss being able to run Windows on your M1-based Mac computer, you’re in luck because the folks behind Parallels Desktop has announced that in the latest version of their software, they are giving users the ability to install Windows 10 on ARM on their Mac computers, although there is a catch.

M1 Gaming Press Release

Right now, Microsoft does not offer regular customers to purchase the ARM version of Windows 10, unlike the other x86 versions of Windows 10 like the Home and Pro versions. Right now, Windows 10 on ARM is only available to computer makers, although users can download the Insider Preview build which is obviously not necessarily meant to be used as a daily driver.

Parallels M1 Gaming Pc

This means that even though the latest version of Parallels Desktop does support Windows 10 on ARM, getting a copy of the software will prove difficult. We’re not sure if Microsoft ever plans on making Windows 10 on ARM a purchasable copy like Windows 10, so we’ll have to wait and see.

Parallels M1 Windows 10

In the meantime, like we said, you can always rely on the Insider Preview, or if you’re a bit more adventurous, you can also check out Linux distros such as Ubuntu, Kali Linux, Debian, and Fedora Workstation.

Parallels M1 Gaming Review

Filed in . Read more about Apps, M1, Macos, Microsoft, Parallels, Windows and Windows 10. Source: theverge