We asked Microsoft if it plans to change this policy to allow Windows 10 on ARM-based Macs, and the company says “we have nothing further to share at this time.”įortunately, they had something to share later, again through an official Microsoft spokesperson (that faceless PR-driven process where press or analysts can ask Microsoft for an official response to a question). “Microsoft only licenses Windows 10 on ARM to OEMs,” says a Microsoft spokesperson in a statement to The Verge. For example, this article on the Verge contained a quote from Microsoft: But Microsoft made statements via spokespeople saying this wasn’t supported. Technically, there was nothing that prevented you from using any Windows 11 key to do this, as Windows product keys are not architecture-specific, so you can use the same key with x86 (RIP), 圆4, and ARM64 OSes. You need a Windows 11 ARM64 product key.But they did make a Windows Insider ARM64 virtual hard disk image available for download, and that will work with Hyper-V (if you’ve got a Windows 11 ARM64 machine running Hyper-V) as well as with Parallels or VMware, so that’s a reasonable workaround. There are no ISOs or WIM files available for this, as Microsoft hasn’t ever made these available. Both work reasonably well, but there was one challenge: At that point, Microsoft wouldn’t sell you a version of Windows 11 to run on it. If the topic of virtualization interests you, check out some more of our posts on the subject.In a previous blog post, I talked about two products that enabled running the ARM64 version of Windows 11 on M1-based Macs, Parallels Desktop and VMware Fusion. There are many other options available for virtualization, including the free UTM app which allows you to easily run Windows 11 on an Apple Silicon Mac for example, but there’s also paid solutions including VMWare and Parallels. Go to to find the appropriate download, listed as “Developer preview for macOS / Arm64 (M1/M2) hosts”.

As usual, VirtualBox is completely free to download and to use. While technically in beta, anyone can get access to the developer preview beta ARM build of VirtualBox through the VirtualBox website. It does this by virtualizing hardware (that you can adjust to allocate RAM, storage capacity, etc), so the operating system itself doesn’t know that it’s not running on actual hardware. VirtualBox is virtualization software that allows you to run other operating systems in containers on your Mac directly from the application, for example you can run Linux or Windows directly within VirtualBox, and without having to use dual-booting or anything else.

Run windows on m1 mac