When Apple migrated the Mac platform from Intel CPUs to its own ARM-based chips in 2020, it spelt the end for the Boot Camp utility. Windows simply couldn’t boot on the new M1 hardware, so the popular dual-booting tool was quietly ditched.
However, if you still want to run Windows applications on your Mac, there is a way. For more than a decade, Microsoft has been working on bringing Windows to the ARM platform, and its latest releases are now more than mature enough for day-to-day use. If you want to try out some cross-platform action on your own Apple Silicon Mac, you can buy an ARM edition of Windows 11 from the Microsoft online store (tinyurl.com/5c7t89rp)—or download the latest Insider Preview release and run it for free. Here’s how.
Expectation management
The great thing about Windows on ARM is that it has a built-in translation layer, which enables it to run existing Intel applications without modification. The ARM version of Windows 10 only works with 32-bit code, but the latest Windows 11 builds support 64-bit software, too, so you can run almost any application on ARM hardware. The main exceptions
