This is the team behind a tool called CrossOver that’s popular in some circles as a way of directly running Microsoft Windows apps on the Mac - not by booting into an actual full Windows operating system, but rather by translating Windows APIs and other code into their Mac equivalents.ĬrossOver is actually based on the long-standing open-source Wine Project, which was originally conceived as a means of bringing Windows apps to the Linux environment. While Parallels and VMware have gotten the most attention over the years for those who want to run Mac apps, there’s actually been another player in the game for years that you may not have heard of, known as Codeweavers. That said, Parallels says it’s working on a version of Parallels Desktop for M1 Macs which looks extremely promising, especially since Microsoft has now committed to support 圆4 applications on Windows on ARM, although it’s still an open question whether the company will make the ARM-based version of Windows available to Mac users. Virtualization apps like Parallels and VMware are a different story, of course, since they could technically offer an emulation layer that would allow the Windows operating system, and its accompanying apps, to operate on an Apple Silicon Mac, but of course there are challenges to this approach, since it would involve translating instruction sets at a very low-level machine code level that’s well beyond what Apple’s own Rosetta 2 is designed to handle. Firstly, there’s no way it’s going to happen natively, since even though Microsoft has an ARM-based version of Windows, it doesn’t actually make it available for end-users to install (at least not yet).įurther, Apple has flat out stated that Boot Camp will not be supported on Apple Silicon Macs - period. Unfortunately, with the transition to Apple Silicon and its ARM-based instruction set, the question of actually running Windows directly on a new M1-based MacBook or Mac mini is suddenly a lot more complicated.

It also didn’t take long for virtualization companies to get on board, and both Parallels and VMware soon had their own Mac apps out that would let you run the Windows operating system itself natively under the Mac OS, without the need to carve out a separate partition or dual-boot into the other operating system. In fact, Apple even helped this process along, offering up its own “Boot Camp” utility that would let Mac users partition off a chunk of their hard drive to set up a dual boot configuration where they could alternate between macOS (still known as “OS X” back in those days) and whatever flavour of Windows they felt like running.

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