Oliver Haslam·

A Developer Has Been Able To Run ARM Windows On An M1 Mac

Apple’s new M1-powered Macs run on a version of ARM processors that are designed by Apple, but that means that there’s no Boot Camp and no Windows. At least, not officially.

One developer has been able to get Windows running on their M1 Mac, and he reckons it runs surprisingly well.

According to a report on The 8-Bit, developer Alexander Graf has been able to make Windows for ARM run on Apple silicon, although there’s no sign of any x86 version running just yet.

He was able to achieve this by running the Windows ARM64 Insider Preview by virtualizing it through the Hypervisor.framework. This framework allows users to interact with virtualization technologies in user space without having to write kernel extensions (KEXTs), according to Apple.

Interestingly, Graf says that the whole thing is “snappy” which is promising for those who still need to be able to run Windows in some way, even when they’re using one of Apple’s hot new Macs.

The M1 Macs have been extremely well received thanks to their power efficiency, performance, and ability to run cool. Whether any of that will be undone by slapping Windows code onto them remains to be seen, but it’s great to see progress already. It’s likely it’ll be a while before others are following in Graf’s footsteps, however.

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