At work, my colleagues are generally issued Windows machines. Since my manager knows that I’m a Mac fanboy, he graciously issued me a 2016 15-inch MacBook Pro upon hire, and I’ve been seamlessly running all of our company apps through a Parallels Desktop virtual machine running Windows 10 Pro. It’s worked great for me, and I haven’t experienced any compatibility issues.
Recently I asked my manager for approval to service my 2016 MacBook Pro since I needed to repair the defective butterfly keyboard and to replace the battery which was nearing the end of its life. He approved the repairs AND recommended that I get a new MacBook Pro and hold on to the old machine as a backup. Normally I try to use my Macs as long as I possibly can, but that also means that I have to occasionally deal with hard drive failures like this and this. Therefore, it made sense for me to keep a backup computer.
Now I’m running a 2021 16-inch MacBook Pro with the Apple M1 Pro chip. Woot! I thought that transferring my Parallels virtual machine to my new machine would be as simple as installing Parallels Desktop and copying my .pvm file over to my new MacBook Pro. I did that, and here’s what I saw:
Here is some additional information:
It turns out that a virtual machine created on an Intel-based Mac cannot be started on a Mac computer with an M1 chip as discussed here. Instead, a new virtual machine must be created as discussed here. Furthermore, since the M1 chip is an ARM-based processor, you must install an ARM-based version of Windows.
Our IT department officially supports Windows 10 Pro, so I attempted to download an ARM-based version of Windows 10 Pro. I discovered that there was a Windows 10 ARM version in the Windows Insider program, but it is no longer available. A Reddit thread confirmed my findings, and although it appears that there may be unofficial channels where one can obtain Windows 10 ARM installers, I didn’t want to take the risk.
To run Windows on a new M1 Mac, it appears that the only option available today is to run Windows 11 ARM, and I found 2 ways to get it (there are probably other ways, but these were the most obvious to me). The first method is to use the Parallels Desktop Installation Assistant to “Get Windows 11 from Microsoft” as is prominently displayed when you try to create a new virtual machine.
Naturally I selected that option and successfully installed Windows 11 ARM, only to find out later that it defaults to the Windows 11 ARM Home edition. I am not sure why we need to use the Pro edition at work—perhaps it is because Pro supports Active Directory, or it could be any number of other features that Pro supports that Home does not (see a comparison of Home vs. Pro editions of Windows 10 and Windows 11), but in any case I needed to look for a Pro edition.
The second method of getting Windows 11 ARM is to register for the Windows Insider program and download Windows 11 on ARM Insider Preview here. The current build is 22523, and I can confirm that it is the Pro version:
I am not aware of an official release of Windows 11 Pro on ARM, so I believe this “beta” version to be the only version around. All the usual apps (Microsoft Office 365, Adobe Reader, Notead++, 7-Zip, and other apps I use day to day) as well as custom company apps seem to run fine on Windows 11 Pro Insider Preview, so all seems OK for now (knock on wood).
In summary, if you have a new M1 Mac and need to run Windows via Parallels Desktop, just be aware that your ARM-based Windows options are limited to Windows 11 Home and Windows 11 Pro Insider Preview. Windows 10 ARM is no longer available. I wish that Parallels would have made this a little more obvious to me before I switched over to an M1 Mac. It might not have deterred me from upgrading, but it would have been nice to know about my options ahead of time.
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