bootcamp Want Windows 10 on your new M1 Mac? Ask Microsoft, Not Apple

[captain_to_fire]

Summary

 

 Basically, the M1 Macs are capable of running Windows 10 on ARM natively, it's up to Microsoft to support it

 

Quotes

Quote

As for Windows running natively on the machine, "that's really up to Microsoft," he said. "We have the core technologies for them to do that, to run their ARM version of Windows, which in turn of course supports x86 user mode applications. But that's a decision Microsoft has to make, to bring to license that technology for users to run on these Macs. But the Macs are certainly very capable of it."

 

My thoughts

Right now, the likes of Parallels and WMware Fusion isn't running well on M1 Macs maybe because virtualization programs for x86 is much more diffcult to translate than a video editor.

ARM chips have supported virtualization for years already and it's no secret that this is how Apple showed how devs can run other operating systems like Linux.

While Bootcamp maybe gone at the moment for M1 Macs, Apple could bring it back should Microsoft wishes to do so. But at the state of W10 on ARM, I doubt anyone would want to dabble with that considering that WoA has been around since 2012 and so far (first it was Windows RT, then Windows 10 on ARM), little progress has been made. Even the reviews of the current ARM PCs with Snapdragon chips, many will tell that x86 emulation costs a huge performance penalty. As I've said once in a status update reply, Apple succeeded where Microsoft failed. Maybe this time when ARM on PCs getting more attention and the likes of Qualcomm and even Huawei who is now making desktop ARM chips, maybe more developers port their programs to ARM64. It doesn't even need to be a UWP app afaik to run natively on Windows 10 PC with an ARM chip. Maybe that will be the time when Apple brings back Bootcamp to AS Macs.

 

So far, if you are currently holding on to an Intel based Mac because of Bootcamp, Apple assured that support will continue for "years to come"  which is quite vague. How many years is "many years to come"? Will it be like PowerPC which only got Mac OS X Tiger and Leopard? Craig Federighi said the following:

Quote

From a software point of view, we haven't created a branch of macOS. There's not the version of macOS for M1-based Macs and a different version of macOS for intel. They're literally the same installer. It's the same source tree. It's the same OS we're building every night. It's a single project, and that will continue to be the case. 

 

So as we build next year's [major macOS release] and so forth, we're building it as a universal OS that works on both systems. And so, if you buy an Intel Mac today, or if you already own one, you're going to continue—just as you would have expected—getting free macOS upgrades for years to come.

Back when Apple transitioned to Intel chips in 2005, Macs became "just another PC", now there's more than differentiates a Mac from PC OEMs with their own ARM chips.

 

 

Sources

9to5 Mac, Ars Technica

[SansVarnic]

The best burn for Apple users is to install Windows on a Mac then walk around various coffee shops and use it.

Maybe even make a laptop sticker with the following? WinMac or Macdows... or something else funny to slap on there.

 

 

*edit

Disclaimer: I am not anti-apple but I seldom get to make apple jokes so here is my once-a-year attempt.

[saltycaramel]

Microsoft at this time would only need to state “we’re working on it” and take their time to do it.

 

But would their PC OEM partners be happy about this?

And would their Surface hardware division be happy about such an announcement?

 

A lot of people would just switch to M1 Macs if they had the peace of mind of being able to run the occasional XYZ program that’s not available on macOS. 

 

[leadeater]

Hmm I'd like to see this, just for curiosity sake. I hope somewhere internally Microsoft is doing just this even if they never intend to actually support it but to evaluate Windows on ARM on a not pathetic CPU. Hope something like that reaches the light of day.

[captain_to_fire]

 

1 hour ago, SansVarnic said:

Maybe even make a laptop sticker with the following? WinMac or Macdows... or something else funny to slap on there.

I once placed an Apple sticker on my old Toshiba laptop back in college

4 minutes ago, saltycaramel said:

But would their PC OEM partners be happy about this?

Why wouldn't they? It's not like the Mac market share is huge. Chances are the likes of Dell, Asus, etc will continue to ignore WoA until they see developer adoption.

3 minutes ago, leadeater said:

evaluate Windows on ARM on a not pathetic CPU

Maybe AMD can do it since they have an ARM license. Or maybe Intel can bring Itanium/IA-64 to consumer CPUs as an ARM challenger?

[leadeater]

2 minutes ago, like_ooh_ahh said:

Or maybe Intel can bring Itanium/IA-64 to consumer CPUs as an ARM challenger?

 

Unless Intel really does want to kill their business lol.

[GDRRiley]

18 minutes ago, like_ooh_ahh said:

Or maybe Intel can bring Itanium/IA-64 to consumer CPUs as an ARM challenger?

hpe already has enough issues, they don't to make more systems with different architectures 

[saltycaramel]

34 minutes ago, like_ooh_ahh said:

Why wouldn't they? It's not like the Mac market share is huge.

That’s the old world.

 

In this brave new world of the Macs being superior performance wise and battery life wise in an unequivocal manner, all bets are off.

What if the proportions in the market share just “recalibrate” a bit. That could still mean billions $ lost for some.

 

A lot of Intel Macs adoption in 2006 was driven by the peace of mind of being able to use Windows programs (whether in VMs or just restarting and booting Windows on bare metal)..nowadays it’s probably less important but it may be the tipping point for some of the potential switchers..

[RejZoR]

I don't think x86 or Windows are inherently bad. The thing is, there is a big disconnect between software and/or hardware. Either software is so far ahead you have to wait for hardware to catch up or it's the hardware so ahead you are waiting for software to catch up. And it's rarely when both are perfectly in sync. With Apple on the other hand, software AND hardware are perfectly in sync basically 99% of the time. Even during current transition phase, they are at 80% synchronicity. Windows was at like 25% at best when they just transitioned from Win9x to WinNT architecture. So much stuff was broken and so much stuff you had to wait to get updated and some of it never got updated like all the games shitting their pants because they had SafeDisc DRM shoved in and its protection driver was a total poo that refused to run on new WinNT architecture. Or the other way where AMD released "moar cores" with Ryzen and we had to wait for ages for Windows to catch up that all of a sudden we have all these cores available. And because it was a novel CCX design, Windows not understanding the concept of cores arrangement it was sub optimal. Or for new Intel's big and little cores design. Most of the stuff will have problems with that and we won't get optimal results for a while. And I'm only talking about OS! Where are all the apps understanding how CPU works and what OS offers via that. Apple made sure their new big and small core design was perfectly understood by the OS on launch and also made sure transition for apps will be much painless.

 

We need more of that on Windows (and Linux) PC's, but I can't see how since Apple is one entity maintaining hardware and OS now entirely. Windows/Linux PC's have this massive disconnect between hardware vendors and software vendors and that's the real problem, not x86 or whatever.

[Master Disaster]

I'll give it 6 months tops before some modder releases a method to run Windows ARM on the M1 macs. It will run even worse than Windows ARM does normally but it will happen.

[Video Beagle]

7 minutes ago, Master Disaster said:

I'll give it 6 months tops before some modder releases a method to run Windows ARM on the M1 macs. It will run even worse than Windows ARM does normally but it will happen.

6 months? I'd be surprised if there isn't something by Christmas.

[saltycaramel]

13 minutes ago, RejZoR said:

I don't think x86 or Windows are inherently bad. The thing is, there is a big disconnect between software and/or hardware. Either software is so far ahead you have to wait for hardware to catch up or it's the hardware so ahead you are waiting for software to catch up. And it's rarely when both are perfectly in sync. With Apple on the other hand, software AND hardware are perfectly in sync basically 99% of the time. Even during current transition phase, they are at 80% synchronicity. Windows was at like 25% at best when they just transitioned from Win9x to WinNT architecture. So much stuff was broken and so much stuff you had to wait to get updated and some of it never got updated like all the games shitting their pants because they had SafeDisc DRM shoved in and its protection driver was a total poo that refused to run on new WinNT architecture. Or the other way where AMD released "moar cores" with Ryzen and we had to wait for ages for Windows to catch up that all of a sudden we have all these cores available. And because it was a novel CCX design, Windows not understanding the concept of cores arrangement it was sub optimal. Or for new Intel's big and little cores design. Most of the stuff will have problems with that and we won't get optimal results for a while. And I'm only talking about OS! Where are all the apps understanding how CPU works and what OS offers via that. Apple made sure their new big and small core design was perfectly understood by the OS on launch and also made sure transition for apps will be much painless.

 

We need more of that on Windows (and Linux) PC's, but I can't see how since Apple is one entity maintaining hardware and OS now entirely. Windows/Linux PC's have this massive disconnect between hardware vendors and software vendors and that's the real problem, not x86 or whatever.

Another way to look at this: these Macs are now “consoles”. Like a PS3 if all its exotic hardware was also super easy to leverage by software devs. 

 

AS Macs are “personal computing consoles”. But contrary to gaming consoles which usually see 0 or recently 1 more powerful hw revision over 7 years, a new more powerful hardware revision of AS Macs will be released three times a year (M1, M1X, M1T, then M2, M2X, M2T, then M3, M3X, M3T, etc., I’m not counting the MacPro that will probably have longer update cycles). How can “regular” (fully modular and abiding to industry standards) PCs  (x86 or not) keep up with these Mac consoles that get released yearly at a competitive performance-per-$ and (and this is where the x86 part maybe does matter) crazy good performance-per-Watt?

[Dabombinable]

1 hour ago, leadeater said:

 

Unless Intel really does want to kill their business lol.

Still can't believe the length of HP's contract with Intel...trying to ship a product that was damn near DOA for so many years.

[Doobeedoo]

I was just thinking about this, being how MS already has experience with Windows on ARM and existing chips are just crap really. I would 've expected Apple would lock such a thing. But yeah would be awesome to see this. I feel MS is kinda slacking, they really should focus on such a thing more. 

[NotTheFirstDaniel]

I think this was always the case for WoA and ASi. Microsoft, for some reason, just refuses to license their ARM Operating Systems to end users. First with Windows RT, now with Windows 10. I mean, you could make the argument that before this, the only ARM devices that didn't come with Windows 10 by default were devices like the Raspberry Pi, but now that Apple is moving to ARM SOCs, there's going to be millions of these consumer-level computers, and I'd assume thousands of them would love to use Windows on their Mac.

 

If this were to happen, though, I think Apple would take a backseat approach to it. Apple's focus on Bootcamp has been slowly dying, even leading up to the 16" MacBook Pro where Apple just stopped making drivers and gave AMD that responsibility (a responsibility they failed to deliver on). It would definitely have to be Microsoft who makes the drivers, in collaboration with the hardware team at Apple, not the other way around.

 

It's good to see that people's fears of ASi being locked down to hell are being slowly quenched. That was always the case, they mentioned it back in WWDC. By default, the Macs would come with an iPhone/iBoot level of Secure Boot, making 3rd party installs practically impossible. But, with a terminal command, you can turn it off. People are already working on custom bootloaders to boot Linux on it. I think I heard people at Checkra1n are porting their iPhone bootloader pongOS to the Mac. I'd assume we'd see the first teaser/success by December, and maybe a public release by new years.

 

What I'm saying is the next few years are going to be great for ARM.

[avg123]

lol why buy a mac just to install windows on it? 

apple will be happy to sell macbooks to the 0.1% who would be dumb enough to do it and make that profit they otherwise would not be making

[porina]

1 hour ago, avg123 said:

lol why buy a mac just to install windows on it? 

I wanted to ask my previous employer to do that, but didn't get a chance before I was out of there. We had a choice, Dell or Apple. That's it. The Dells they were offering really sucked compared to Apple, which is saying something. Having it dual boot straight into Windows would have likely given me a better experience than the Dell. My old Dell was way beyond replacement cycle but the bean counters forced it to be stretched way long. 

[bcredeur97]

13 hours ago, SansVarnic said:

The best burn for Apple users is to install Windows on a Mac then walk around various coffee shops and use it.

Maybe even make a laptop sticker with the following? WinMac or Macdows... or something else funny to slap on there.

 

 

*edit

Disclaimer: I am not anti-apple but I seldom get to make apple jokes so here is my once-a-year attempt.

i have had a 2015 macbook pro i got as a gift since new.

I've run bare metal linux on it ever since, and I have a Linux KVM virtualized windows OS in case I need windows for something. Lol

[Roswell]

I don’t see it happening with how few people actually use bootcamp now. It was a widely used feature until VM software started integrating direct hardware access.

 

Now the vast majority use Parallels or VMware. Much easier to spin up a VM that runs nearly at native performance than it is to reboot into Windows.

 

Hell, with Parallels you can stick Windows apps on the dock and just click them like any other program and they will open in a regular window and keep the rest of the VM hidden. You don’t even have to look at the Windows desktop UI at all.

 

 

[captain_to_fire]

2 hours ago, Vitamanic said:

Hell, with Parallels you can stick Windows apps on the dock and just click them like any other program and they will open in a regular window and keep the rest of the VM hidden. You don’t even have to look at the Windows desktop UI at all.

Too bad neither Parallels nor VMWare Fusion works on M1 Macs even with Rosetta 2

Also, the best performance is always seen when an OS runs on bare metal instead of being virtualized

[wamred]

I guess that makes sense. I mean, the ability to run Windows on a Mac natively is a big plus though. To be fair, I am not going to be buying an Apple computer anyway so I don't care, but I feel like that is something that should be able to happen. Anyway, I'll quit yapping now. 

[Roswell]

2 hours ago, like_ooh_ahh said:

Too bad neither Parallels nor VMWare Fusion works on M1 Macs even with Rosetta 2

Also, the best performance is always seen when an OS runs on bare metal instead of being virtualized

Parallels is already running beta for M1 and is expected to release soon, so that's kind of a non issue. 

 

Parallels also has direct hardware access, so your point on "bare metal" is kind of moot when running my Windows 10 VM nets only like a 8% loss in performance (this is how people comfortably game on it). Have a look for yourself:

 

[Guest]

Thats probably a hint they've dont it, but just can't say because licensing. 

[captain_to_fire]

11 hours ago, avg123 said:

lol why buy a mac just to install windows on it? 

It's one of the selling points of the Mac during the "Get a Mac campaign" that lasted from 2006-2009; being able to easily run two operating systems natively thanks to Boot Camp Assistant

[leadeater]

14 hours ago, avg123 said:

lol why buy a mac just to install windows on it? 

So many people did this back around 2010 and earlier, MacBook Pros were leagues ahead of pretty well every other laptop and also had very strong looks appeal so were very compelling option for many.

 

The only issue I had was when people wanted to dual boot on network managed installations, going in to detail isn't really necessary but suffice to say I fought very hard, and won, that if you buy a Mac you shall run Mac OS. Took a while to get that win but my life was so much better afterward, dual booting is more than twice the support requirement of the device.

 

But overall if something had good hardware or the capability to do so why should you care if someone does it or try to stop them. At least if they have Apple hardware they might be more likely to give Mac OS a try at some point, more likely than if they did not have Apple hardware.