Apple MacBook Air (Apple M1, 2020) review: The world’s best ultraportable.Parallels Desktop brings Windows 10 apps to Chromebooks.With Parallels Desktop, you can now run Windows on ARM (WoA) in a VM on the M1 platform – and since the OS itself includes an Intel translation layer, it opens the door to running a huge range of Windows apps on the latest Macs.
Rather, the focus is on Microsoft’s own port of Windows 10 for ARM processors. It would be a huge technical challenge to get a standard x86 build of Windows 10 running on Apple’s ARM-based M1 chip, and Parallels doesn’t attempt it. It’s an enticing prospect, but not quite as straightforward as it sounds. Just as version one unlocked the potential of Apple’s then-recent switch to the Intel architecture, this one breaks new ground by allowing you to install and run Windows 10 on Apple Silicon. Yet arguably, this is the most significant release of Parallels Desktop since it first appeared in 2006. Overall it’s not even consequential enough to warrant a full ticking up of the version number.
For them, this update to the popular virtualisation software tidies up a few bugs and adds support for the latest version of the Linux kernel, but that’s largely it. After sixteen major releases, you might think there’s not much left to be added to Parallels Desktop – and for the vast majority of Mac users who are still using Intel CPUs, there isn’t.
