Microsoft wants its OS everywhere. That and MS Office are their bread and butter. Apple is keeping them back and I'm sure it is for privacy and security reasons.
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Bootable Windows 10 any time soon?
- Thread starter majormike
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This is so very wrong on so many accounts. It's Microsoft that's holding back on the license, not Apple.
Not a dev but I used to run a Windows VM on my work MBP. I needed to run MSSQL to query some databases for customer support investigations.
I guarantee Office will make it to the M1. Installation of Windows will fall into the hands of our great techs within these forums.
Yep you're absolutely correct because Office is already out for M1 Macs. ?
It's a niche crowd that needs or installs Windows on the Mac and I would rather see Apple put forth resources towards MacOS rather than wasting resources on the niche crowd who needs Windows. That's what Windows machines are for.
Solid virtualization support is one of the basic features expected of a modern professional computer system. You might discount is as a niche requirement, but that's a slippery slope — if you continue to eliminate all the niche things you will end up with a Chromebook.
Apple fully supports virualization on M1, now it's up to third-party to offer usable solutions. Windows already runs on my M1 Mac, so I don't think it will take too long for an official release. Summer or so sounds likely.
With a few minor exceptions, Office already runs natively on Apple Silicon and has for a while. Microsoft Edge also runs natively on AS and is my browser of choice.
For us people that need more than one OS, it's VERY common to run multiple VM's of every OS we use. It's very convenient in testing to have multiple configs available.
And besides, "best" is not something that can be easily achieved -- one has to strive for efficient, less cost, less weight and space, and less time.
I do for my projects as well. So far things look bright for Apple Silicon and Parallels. I'm hoping my VMWare licenses will be usable but starting to have doubts.
I'm of the mind Microsoft will provide a licence for VM use on ARM. Maybe I'm wrong, but see no reason this hurts them.
Gotcha, but here's the thing. When it comes to this forum it's very one-sided. Just as you mentioned that virtualization support is a basic feature expected of a modern professional computer the same can be said about Windows PC's. I don't see this other than Linux. My other issue is people here don't appear to want Macs to run Windows for an occasional app, they want the Apple hardware to run Windows full time. That's why you see the small crowd here upset that this hasn't happened. I've already read a few here that said a Mac offers very little value to them if it can't run Windows. For that reason alone it shows that they should be using Windows machines because MacOS means little to nothing to them. With the mentality some have here Apple might as well sell the hardware only and discontinue making MacOS. That would probably make a lot of Windows fanboys super happy anyway. They want Windows to maintain a monopoly.
I think you're seeing wrong for most of us. No way in heck I'd buy Apple HW at a premium and not use MacOS with it. If it's going to run Windows 100% of the time, I'll buy a Dell or a Lenovo, it's cheaper and just as good hardware. (and better supported for Windows!) But I'm happy to run MacOS at home with Apple's hypervisor, plus Windows VM's, and Linux VM's. I even have some really weird OS's in a VM...
Oh man if I could get Project/Visio for M1 I would be able to remove like 200 Vmware Fusion licenses from my account.
I don't think it's that bad. Just an occasional person here or there singing the old song of "Mac doesn't run BRICK LAYER MANAGER PRO, so it's unsuitable for a professional!". Most opinions I encounter are much more reasonable.
Agree, that's a silly mentality and one that shows a completely misunderstanding the business reality. But again the number of people with this mentality seems to be very small.
Dell XP 13 with HiDPI display (8GB RAM, 256GB SSD) — $1399
M1 MacBook Pro (8GB, 256GB SSD) — $1299
The Mac is 30-50% faster in professional workflows, 50% faster GPU-wise, twice the battery life, better color accuracy, better speakers.
"Cheaper" has always been relative, and "just as good hardware" doesn't really apply anymore after Apple moved to their own chips.
That's just normal marketing and having a bit of fun. You don't really believe that adverts are a way to gauge companies' willingness to cooperate, surely? Samsung mobile pokes fun at Apple all the time. Apple buys tons of components from Samsung on a daily basis.
MS is pretty keen to get off its reliance on Intel. This is why they have embraced other platforms and released first class citizen versions of their applications on those platforms. This is why they continue work on a version of Windows that does not rely on x86 microprocessor architecture, despite their efforts being mostly a failure so far.
Even though they are not part of the normal 0365 subscription and need to be added by paying quite a bit extra, I would also mention Project and Visio as the missing apps that would be wonderful to have in MacOS.
I get the impression that the person you quoted has never actually used Office applications on the Mac, or maybe used them in 2009. They probably read something on these forums, or elsewhere, about it and formed an opinion. Office application do not run like a dog on MacOS and haven't for longer than I can remember. Maybe about a decade ago Excel would open faster using equivalent hardware. Additionally Office apps have feature parity across Windows and Mac, even including VBA macros and add-ins. This has been the case for quite a few years now.
There are recent rumours that MS is planning to expand its feature reduced web based versions of Office apps to completely replace native versions anyway, so that they will run through the browser exclusively on all platforms. Once that happens all of this will be moot anyway.
Yes, that was business as usual too. Maybe you don't like knock-the-competition adverts (don't disagree with you there) but that doesn't stop it being a widely used advertising technique. Oh, and "this forum" doesn't agree with anything, but feel free to go and cherry-pick a few criticisms of the "I'm a PC" ads while ignoring all the posters who cheered when "PC guy" showed up at the M1 launch...
What the heck is your point here? MS were promoting their own lightweight laptop against a competitor's laptop - sorry if you didn't like the style of ad. They still make products for Mac.
Now that is a ridiculous claim. Dell, HP, Lenovo, Apple, Microsoft et. al. are all competing in the same "premium laptop" market (which, arguably, Apple created).
Sorry, but just because you don't like something doesn't make it go away. Many Mac Users depend on Office either because they like it or because its the only reliable way to exchange documents with Windows Office users (yeah, LibreOffice etc. will have a good college try at rendering Office docs, but more often than not the formatting gets corrupted).
...no, some people put up with the nags, the restrictions and the risk of getting fired if your employer does a software audit. Others pay for the software they use. Anyway, it's likely that WoA-for-Mac would be a bundle with Parallels or something. At the moment, people are running
Hang on, I thought Office for Mac was "dumbed down", that "most average consumers" weren't using it, and that MS's anti-Apple ads meant that "even a dead person" could see that MS wouldn't do anything to support Mac?
Please make up your mind - or at least understand that the world is a bit more complex and subtle than you'd like it to be...
Only a small niche are buying Macs specifically to run Windows instead of MacOS, and if virtualisation is no good for them, or never materialises, they're basically out of luck, whether they like it or not, with Apple Silicon. I completely agree that there's no point compromising the development of the Mac & MacOS for that group - it would be nice if there was some "best of both worlds" compromise, but a MacBook with dual Intel and Apple CPUs just isn't viable.
The more common situation is that you can do most things you want on MacOS except for one or two pesky Windows apps that either have no MacOS equivalent, that you're obliged to use for work and/or which you occasionally need to open old files for reference. You don't have to be a MS fan to be in that situation. There will be a partial solution for that - even if it's running x86 Windows under QEMU - but WoA running in a VM would be the least-worst solution.
I'm here to discuss the likelihood of being able to run Windows on Apple Silicon Macs, which is the topic of this thread.
You appear to be here to hijack the discussion so you can rant about an irrelevant Microsoft advert that you don't like, totally dismiss the idea that anybody would ever want to run a Windows App on their Mac and generally bash everything Microsoft while accusing anybody who disagrees with you of being a Microsoft apologist.
Newsflash: lots of people here don't like Microsoft stuff - whether it is Office for Mac or Windows apps - but have to use it anyway where there's no viable Mac equivalent and they don't have the luxury of locking themselves into a little Mac-only bubble.
Depends on whether you mean BootCamp or VM. Apple have said clearly that they're not going to support direct-booting and that their solution for alternative OSs is virtualisation. Apple have done their bit for virtualisation by incorporating a hypervisor "back end" into MacOS - its over to Parallels, VMWare et. al. to produce products that use that, and over to MS to license WoA for it - which could take the form of an OEM agreement between Parallels/VMWare and Microsoft.
People are already running a WoA technical preview under Parallels, and neither Apple or MS have moved to obstruct that. The reasons we are still discussing this are (a) it is currently flakey and unstable - to be expected when you're running a technical preview OS on a technical preview hypervisor, (b) it looks like there's some WoA bundled apps/utils that are still ARM32 that won't run on M1 (c) you can't buy a "retail" Windows-on-ARM license yet.
Nobody here knows what MS's position on this is. However, there's no market for a WoA retail license (or OEM deal with Parallels) until the kinks are out of both Parallels and the preview version of WoA that it actually runs. So you can't read much into the fact that there's been no public announcement yet.
Nothing is certain - Apple could do a U-turn on Bootcamp, MS could decide to drop WoA, the bugs in the current Parallels/WoA combo could prove intractable... but best guess at the moment is that Bootcamp is dead but there will eventually be a WoA VM option.
Windows (at least the Pro edition) comes with a hypervisor app (not just the backend as on MacOS) that supports Windows/Windows Server, Linux, FreeBSD etc. and if that doesn't float your boat there's VMWare Workstation, VirtualBox etc. for Windows... The fact that it doesn't support MacOS is mainly down to Apple not licensing MacOS on non-Mac hardware (there's doubtless a hack out there somewhere to get it sort-of running).
Just to be clear, I 100% agree with all that you write, and I know that Federighi said "no direct booting" in the interview, but Apple does actually officially support booting of third-party kernels on Apple Silicon. This support was added in 12.2 and that's what allows Correlium to boot Linux on M1 machines.
I suppose this could in theory enable booting of Windows on Apple Silicon natively, but I doubt we will ever see it outside of hacker's playgrounds. Just to much work and no clear benefit. Virtualization is a safer and ultimately a more useful bet.
I wouldn't buy either of those, not enough disk or RAM.
That depends on the CPU for the PC, but add more disk and RAM and then compare the price...
I think you're overestimating just how much the new M1 is performance wise for a general workload, but whatever. I agree its faster at some things, but not really enough to make it a sure buy. Though I do wonder if Apple will ever come out with a server version...
One thing I see needing done on both Windows PC's and Macbooks, is better cooling, but that's easier said than done.
I think they've been clear from the start that they'll allow unsigned kernels to boot - I recall looking at a WWDC transcript that talked about that, but only in the context of (in future) developers running no-longer-signed versions of MacOS - no mention of alternative OSs.
The "support" needed in the Windows/Linux case isn't so much about permitting other OSs to run, as providing the technical details on M1 needed for third parties to write decent, stable drivers for graphics, acceleration etc. - and then not changing those without notice on each new iteration of Apple Silicon. Correlium seem to have some experience with reverse-engineering drivers for iOS (and getting sued by Apple for doing so, if unsuccessfully) so it will be interesting to see what comes of their Linux port.
However, good enough stability for a niche project for security testing (honest gov!) might not be good enough for Microsoft to put their name on. (Even on x86 Linux, the third-party "free" drivers for NVIDIA etc. are less than perfect).
All this could, of course, change - no laws of physics are involved - However, I'm not sure if the effort would be warranted for Windows-on-ARM (which isn't going to solve anything for a lot of BootCamp users who want x86 Windows) when a WoA VM would have far wider appeal.
...that's actually the major advantage of the M1 over Intel - haven't seen many complaints about cooling on the M1 Macs. Most of Apple's Intel vs. M1 claim were about performance vs. power consumption (and power consumption is essentially the same as cooling requirement).
The big fix-up in Intel's anti-M1 benchmarks was that they'd used different machines for the performance and power consumption tests (naughty!)
Make no mistake, the M1 is all about the fanless MacBook Air, which thrashes the Intel Air and anything else of the same size/weight. It's performance is very promising for M1X/M2/whatever machines, but we've yet to see what they're really going to be like and how they deal with the need for a bigger GPU and more RAM vs. the everything-on-one-package advantages of the M1.
Well, let's bump it up to 16GB RAM and 1TB SSD
Dell XPS 13 $2,049.99
M1 MBP $1,899.00
Depends on the workflow of course. If all you do is read emails it probably won't matter to you (but than you don't need the RAM and the disk space, no?). Still, M1 will be faster than Tiger Lake for almost anything, usually by a healthy margin. And it will have much better battery life. So unless you specifically rely on Windows software or have a niche workflow that runs better on the Intel CPU (the only domains I am aware of where this is the case would be BigNum and potentially some AVX512-enabled applications), M1 is offers a better value proposition.
Why do you think M1 machines need better cooling?
Still, the functionality they have implemented supports booting any kernel — it's not limited to old macOS versions.
We are in full agreement here. A lot of people in this thread focus too much on "booting" itself and completely disregard what comes afterwards. Ability to boot natively is not even the tip of the iceberg, it's a little spec of snow on the top...
I have a MBA-M1, and it starts throttling almost immediately for me, and that doesn't even count when I start up a VM. I know the MBP would do better because of active cooling, but I didn't want to risk spending that much on something I might not be able to use. (My MBA has 16G RAM and 1TB disk)
Anyway, I was talking about real world performance, not benchmarks. How fast does it feel, where's the annoyances, things like that.
The jury is still out on that one for me. I know the MBA needs better cooling, but I haven't use an actively cooled M1 machine yet. I know me 2017 MBP had extremely sucky cooling. It was loud and didn't really keep it cool anyway.