Welp! If you are a Mac user that loves running Windows on your machine, then the newly announced ARM based Macs come with a somewhat distressing news.
Wonderful as these new machines are, they will not support the installation of Windows via Boot Camp.
Apple confirmed this little fact that direct booting an alternate operating system will not be possible on these devices, and the company is going the purely virtualization route for those that want to deploy a different operating system on these Macs.
In fact, Craig Federighi of Apple made it a point to note that hypervisors these days are very efficient, so the needs to direct boot should not be a concern.
Only that, it is!
While installing Windows on a regular Intel powered Macs is an easy enough process, and using a Microsoft operating system in a virtual machine through the use of virtualization tools works very well, things quickly get complicated when you bring ARM into the picture.
The platform is not as versatile due to this Bootcamp limitation.
And even if virtualization tools like Parallels Desktop and VMware are eventually recompiled for the ARM64 architecture, Mac users would still need a Windows 10 on ARM license. And this is something that Microsoft does not sell — it only licenses it to OEMs.
So, moral of the story.
Mac users who really need to use Windows will need to stick with Intel based Macs for now. Apple has announced that it will continue to release new Intel models during this ARM transition, and the version of macOS for Intel will also be supported for the foreseeable future.
Hopefully by the time that is complete, a few years down the road, the Windows on ARM situation will be a bit clearer.
