Parallels Desktop can cost up to $99.99 per year, though you can give the trial version a shot first. Since we’re going to use a third-party application to install Windows 10, go ahead and download Parallels Desktop 16 for Mac ( download link).You will face compatibility issues with legacy Windows apps due to this. This is a different version of Windows 10 meant for devices with a non-圆4 CPU like the M1 Macs. You will be installing Windows 10 ARM on your M1 Mac.Make sure you’ve at least 22GB of internal storage on your Mac.Installing Windows 10 on M1 Mac: Things to Knowīefore installing Windows 10 on your Mac, you need to keep a few things in your mind. On a side note, if you only want to run Windows 10 apps on your laptop and don’t need to use the full-fledged Windows environment, you can follow this guide on how to run Windows apps on M1 MacBook Air, MacBook Pro, iMac, and Mac mini. This means you can now run Windows 10 and macOS Big Sur side-by-side on your M1 Mac. Parallels Desktop, a popular operating system emulation software, has been updated to support M1 Macs. Therefore, users have to rely on other emulation apps to run Windows 10. However, with the M1-based Macs, this is no longer possible since they are based on the ARM64 architecture.Īpple does not ship Bootcamp on M1 Macs anymore. This application simply created a partition on Mac’s hard disk and installed the required components and drivers to run Windows 10 on the Mac natively. Until it introduced its custom Apple Silicon-based Macs, Apple allowed one to install Windows 10 directly via Bootcamp. Plus, the Windows 10 version you will be running on your M1 Mac will be the ‘ARM’ flavor, which means you are going to face some app compatibility issues.

This should lead to a slight performance penalty, but it is unlikely to matter to most people. Instead, you will be running it virtually. And we are going to do use just that to install Windows 10 on your M1 Mac using Parallels Desktop.Īdmittedly, you will not be running Windows 10 natively on your M1 Mac. Thankfully, there’s virtualization support on the new Apple Silicon chips. Previously, the common x86 architecture meant that it was easy to run Windows 10 on an Intel-based Mac, but that’s not the case anymore. Thankfully, there’s a way via which you can install Windows 10 on your M1 MacBook Air, MacBook Pro, Mac mini, or the iMac.Īpple’s M1 chip is very different from the traditional x86 architecture-based CPUs that modern PCs, laptops, and even Intel-based Macs use. However, one of the downsides of using an M1 Mac is that they do not support Bootcamp, meaning you cannot install and dual-boot Windows on it. The performance of M1 Macs will keep on improving as more and more apps are optimized for Apple Silicon.

Apple’s M1-based Macs are really, really fast.

Windows 10 on m1 mac