Despite what I just said…

It was only February this year when I was banging on about Windows emulation software and that Parallels should  be avoided. If you missed that rant or have forgotten, check it out here.

However, having just finished telling you that Parallels should be avoided it might be, in the face of Apple’s M1 chip revolution, the only way to go.

Heavy sigh.

To understand the predicament we are in it is important to know about the history of emulation.

Don’t worry, it is not as boring as it sounds.

Way back when parachute pants was a thing, the Mac – a Mac plus to be precise – was able to emulate Windows using something called MacGeorge. (Your guess is as good as mine as to why it was called that.)

So while we have had a long history of emulating Windows it has not always been the smoothest or most rewarding of rides.

For starters, until Apple moved to the INTEL chip set in 2006, Macs were running on Motorola chips and this meant that any emulation software had to emulate all the instructions from a INTEL chip and convert them to something a Motorola chip could understand. Net result… emulation was knee tremblingly slow.

Then, Apple moved to INTEL and suddenly the world of emulation exploded. Not only did packages like Parallels and VMWare offer much improved speeds over the dark days of Motorola but Apple introduced BootCamp. BootCamp allowed the user to partition their hard disk and install Windows natively, meaning – as the Wall Street Journal put it – the best Windows PC you could buy was a MacBook.

Apple running on INTEL + Windows written for INTEL = emulation was a real alternative to buying a PC.

That, I am sorry to say, now appears dead. For now.

You see the M1 chip is, at its core, a ARM processor and Microsoft have spent very little – if any – time developing Windows for ARM. This means that BootCamp is dead and any software emulation needs to go back to the good old days of interpreting INTEL instruction set for the ARM processor.

About now you are probably wondering why on earth I am raving about this? 

“Yes Renny, we know you don’t like Parallels and thats OK… we’ll wait for VMware to bring out their M1 version. Surely that’s the plan?”

Sadly no. It seems that VMware have no intention of rushing Windows emulation until, quote “Microsoft releasing an version of Windows that is licensed to be emulated under ARM”

Trouble with that is Microsoft aren’t rushing that to market either… so far as I can tell. So that’s VMWare out of the game for the foreseeable future.

You can read the full story here.

Second heavy sigh.

This leaves Parallels… the subject of my scorn only a few months back. They appear to be have gone in feet first and ‘claim’ phenomenal speeds and given it is running an INTEL version of Windows I can only assume that they are levering off the eye bulging performance of the M1 chip to make up the short fall.

Oh sure, there are other products out there.

UTM – complicated and, to date, haven’t managed to get it to work.

VirtualBox – no plans. Product appears to be dead.

Wine – geeky, limited and never worked reliably anyway.

Crossover – This has promise. Like Wine it allows you to install a Windows app without Windows. But it is a bit wayward always warning you  “this application may not work” or “This application will not install” but I installed a few “unsupported applications” so it is worth a try. You can get a 14 day trial so that is useful to see if your important applications work before committing. I installed it on my INTEL Mac and it worked very well so I can only assume the performance is going to be as good (but probably a whole lot better) on the M1 chip.

So the point of all of this article was to say, despite what I have just said, it seems – for the time being at least – Parallels might be the best alternative we have when wanting to run Windows on an M1 chip.

Third heavy sigh.