- The developers also note that, on a Mac sporting an Apple M1 chip, Parallels Desktop 16.5 uses 2.5x less energy than on a 2020 Intel-based MacBook Air. 'Apple's M1 chip is a significant breakthrough for Mac users,' said Nick Dobrovolskiy, Parallels Senior Vice President of Engineering and Support in a statement.
- Jan 18, 2021 The new Macs featuring Apple’s M1 chip support CrossOver 20 for running a few Windows games. CrossOver is based on the open-source Wine project that allows users to run some 32-bit Windows games.
- M1 Mac users now have a new way to virtualize Windows on their machines. Parallels has officially released Parallels Desktop 16.5 today with native support for Apple Silicon, enabling users to run.
The easy option is a new version of Parallels desktop, the company’s desktop hypervisor for macOS. Released Wednesday, is now offered in a native version for Apple’s own M1 silicon. Parallels says the new offering is for Windows 10 ARM Insider Preview and “the most popular ARM-based Linux distributions.”.
Parallels Desktop M1
Parallels has released a Technical Preview Program for running Parallels Desktop 16 on M1-powered Macs. The company says that it created a “new virtualization engine that uses the Apple M1 Mac chip hardware-assisted virtualization” to allow users to run ARM-based operating systems, including Windows, in a virtual machine.
Parallels points out some limitations with the first version of the Parallels 16 Technical Preview for Apple Silicon Macs:
:no_upscale()/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_asset/file/22443416/windowsonmacm1.jpg "Parallels")
- It is not possible to install or start an Intel x86 based operating system in a virtual machine.
- It is not possible to suspend and resume a virtual machine, including reverting to a “running state” snapshot.
- It is not possible to use the “close” button when a virtual machine is running – shut down the virtual machine instead.
- ARM32 applications do not work in a virtual machine.
The company says it continues to focus on expanding the capabilities of Parallels on M1 Macs as well:
Many Parallels Desktop features depend on a virtualization engine and guest OS architecture and must be developed nearly from scratch for the Apple M1 chip: starting from running an OS itself, graphics, the ability to suspend/resume a virtual machine, seamless integration, Coherence mode, Shared Folders, and many more. While our team continues to work hard on bringing all of the best Parallels Desktop features to Mac computers with Apple M1 chip, we are proud to share the results we achieved with this significant milestone.
With those limitations in mind, however, this technically means that you can run the ARM version of Windows using the Parallels Technical Preview on an M1 Mac. Microsoft does not sell a version of Windows that will run on Apple Silicon Macs with Parallels, but the company has made a version available to members of the Windows Insider Program.
You can head to the Microsoft website to download the Insider Preview version of Windows for use an Apple Silicon Mac with Parallels. If you’re not a member of the Insider Preview program, you can also request to join through this link.
Parallels M1 Apple Phone
Here’s a look at the process of installing Windows through Parallels on an M1 Mac in action:
Today’s release of the Parallels Desktop 16 Technical Preview for M1 Macs comes less than a month after the company teased that it was in development. This release makes a major milestone in the ongoing quest for a way to run Windows on M1 Macs.
Do you plan on using the Technical Preview of Parallels Desktop 16 to run Windows on M1-powered Macs? Let us know down in the comments!
Read more about running Windows on M1 Macs:
FTC: We use income earning auto affiliate links.More.
For years, people have speculated about the ability to run iOS apps on the Mac. This speculation was caused by the increasing similarity in the user experiences across the Mac, the iPhone and the iPad, and by Apple’s continuing tech demos showing their work on this capability.
Well, that day has finally arrived. Parallels® just released a new version of the Parallels® Access iOS client that can also be run on an M1 Mac.
I will admit that I was never really that interested in running an iOS app on my Mac, but I now see that I was wrong. This is pretty neat! In addition to Parallels Access, I installed a few other iOS apps on my Mac, among them, HBO Max. In general, a dedicated, special built app will almost always be better than using a webpage with similar functionality. And that is true for Parallels Access and true for HBO Max.
How to install an iOS app on an M1 Mac
The process of finding iOS apps that you want to download and install on an M1 Mac is a bit obtuse right now. (Figure 1). You use the App Store, but to find the iOS apps, you must first go to your account by clicking on your name in the main App Store window, and then use the selector buttons “Mac Apps” or “iPhone & iPad Apps” and choose “iPhone & iPad Apps”. Then you can search for the iOS app you want, for example “Parallels Access”. Hopefully, this will be easier and less circuitous in the future.
If you can’t find an iOS app that you know exists, this may be because the developer has marked the app as not downloadable on a Mac. This is often because the developer has not yet tested the iOS app on the Mac.
Running the Parallels Access iOS client on a Mac
Running the Parallels Access iOS client on a Mac looks just like using it on an iPad (Figure 2).
In this figure you can see that I have seven remote computers set up in Parallels Access: three MacBook Pros, two 27˝ iMac computers, one 21˝ iMac running macOS Catalina, and a really old ThinkPad running Windows 7. I can access any of them from the Parallels Access client on my iPad or on my M1 MacBook Pro. (Of course, I can also access these remote computers from any computer with a modern browser, but that is not the focus of this post.) Most importantly, the experiences on the M1 Mac and the iPad are nearly identical. The Mac has no touch screen, and the iPad has no mouse, but aside from these differences, Parallels Access is the same on both platforms.
Video 1 shows some of the Parallels Access functionality from the iOS client running on the M1 MacBook Pro. You can see the Remote Assistance feature added to Parallels Access last summer is available in Parallels Access when you run it on the M1 Mac.
I am also happy to report that the amusing “bug” that is present in almost every remote access application is present in Parallels Access on the M1 Mac: the ability to recursively access the very computer you are running the application from. You can see the result of this in Figure 3.
If you have an M1 Mac, let us know in the comments what iOS apps you have installed on it.
Parallels Access terminology check
Parallels Access is composed of two pieces of software: The Parallels Access client, which is installed on your phone or tablet, and the Parallels Access agent, which is installed on your Mac and PC. These two pieces of software work together to deliver remote access to your Mac and PC. You may have heard that:
The latest version of Parallels Access is a universal binary, meaning it contains the necessary code to run at full speed on either Mac with Intel processor or Mac with the Apple M1 chip.
This is true, but at the time that this was written, the only part of Parallels Access that ran on the Mac was the agent, so saying that the agent is now a universal binary is unnecessary. Well, the world has changed. Since Parallels Access can now run on the Mac—actually only on a Mac with an M1 chip—I would re-word that earlier statement to become:
The latest version of the Parallels Access agent is a universal binary, meaning it contains the necessary code to run at full speed on either Mac with Intel processor or Mac with the Apple M1 chip.