This is SO WRONG. Do some searching on the forums, many people are running full Windows 11 retail release as a VM on Parallels on a Apple Silicon Mac - me included. Parallels has the instructions in their Windows/ARM forum how to install it. I never touched an "Insiders Preview" version. Full licensed, retail release, and then I joined the beta program. Updates have come the same time as everyone else gets them:
From
https://kb.parallels.com/125375 : (Updated Nov 30 2021)
1. Register for Windows Insider Program"
2. After successful registration, click on the button below and download the Windows Client ARM64 Insider Preview VHDX image.
...which takes me to a MS page saying "You must be registered with the Windows Insiders Program to view this page".
If you have a newer version of those instructions
from the official Parallels Knowledge base that says different, do share (since that would be very interesting) but if it's just a forum post by Mx Random Internet Person who's found a backdoor link to the installation image, don't bother.
And, yes, it's well known that you can "activate" WoA with a valid Windows-for-Intel activation code and it will
tell you it is licensed, but all that proves is that Intel isn't really bothered about individuals running WoA - especially if those individuals might be inclined to send them money for a valueless license. When I used a Hackintosh for a while the "About This Mac" box raised not a quibble - you had to dig into the Apple EULA to get the bit about "only licensed for use on an Apple branded computer".
Maybe it would help get you off the hook if MS tried to sue you for copyright infringement (although last I looked "I thought I had a license" wasn't a defence, it
would make MS look stupid - and they're already hugely unlikely to go after individuals who tread on the cracks in the EULA pavement), but that's really not the point here.
The point is that you don't have any commitment from Microsoft to provide WoA on Apple Silicon - and MS have clearly and publicly stated that they
don't support that. Those software updates could stop
tomorrow, your copy of WoA could decide that it is no longer licensed
tomorrow and you would not have a leg to stand on - nor would any large MS customers that might otherwise have some influence.
If you're happy with those odds, then fine. I'm not playing a tiny violin on behalf of Microsoft's precious IP. But when someone asking for buying advice asks what the stats of WoA on Mac is, the answer is that the preview version seems to work well but
Microsoft does not sell WoA for virtual machines and has said that they don't support Apple Silicon.
This is also wrong. The Qualcomm agreement is for running Windows ARM
natively. This is of more interest to those hoping for a bootcamp-type scenario eventually.
XDA were the ones who broke the story.
Nothing in the XDA article mentions any distinction between running WoA natively and running it in a VM - especially a modern VM where most of the code
is executed natively by the processor (so Apple's specific implementation of the ARM instruction set would be relevant). And the details of the
secret agreement which
could make that distinction are, well, still secret...
As for Bootcamp - the processor instruction set is not the only important factor in whether a particular OS will run natively. "Bootcamp" was a viable option on Intel Macs because - certainly before the T1 and T2 chips showed up - Intel Macs were basically just slightly nicer PC clones using generic PC processors, disc controllers, GPUs etc. and even had firmware (EFI) that was intended as a replacement for the PC BIOS and could fairly easily be equipped with a BIOS compatibility mode, after which a standard Windows install DVD "just worked" - or could be made to work by relatively minor customisations to the installer. Bootcamp was mostly a set of "point'n'click" helpers and a one-stop-shop download of drivers to make it easy and safe to achive something that could be done manually if you had nothing better to do.
Apple Silicon Macs are nothing like that - and, beyond using the ARM instruction set, nothing like any other ARM computer on the market (I'm not sure what the state of the art is w.r.t. standardisation between ARM platforms but Apple certainly ain't in that club). The firmware is more like an iPad than anything else, the GPU and the storage controller etc. are proprietary Apple designs optimised for MacOS. A "bootcamp-like" windows installation would require (probably MS) to write completely new bootloaders, storage drivers, graphics drivers etc.
More to the point, Apple have clearly said that they
won't support native booting of third-party operating systems - that doesn't mean they'll they'll actively block anybody who wants to reverse-engineer stuff (like the brave souls trying to make a native Linux distribution) - but it means they can change the specifications on a whim and break everything apart from MacOS.
Under a VM, things are quite different - put simply, the guest OS "sees" whatever hardware platform it was designed for and the hypervisor traps any attempt to access hardware or firmware - and passes those on to the appropriate MacOS drivers. Even the "parallels tools" drivers you install for accelerated graphics etc. are probably fairly modest adaptations of the old Intel versions because they're not "driving hardware" - they're passing messages from the guest OS to MacOS frameworks like Metal.
So, never say never, but Bootcamp on Apple Silicon doesn't make a lot of sense and you shouldn't hold your breath. The future is virtualisation. If
any native-booting OS made sense, it would be a bare-metal hypervisor along the lines of ESX.
...and windows-for-arm virtualisation seems to be working well
but that's moot until MS actually releases WoA for
production use - and currently they're dragging their feet (maybe because of the Qualcomm agreement, maybe because they fancy having a crack at "Microsoft Silicon" at some stage).
