Apple Confirms Boot Camp Will Not Be Supported On Its ARM-Based Macs

While Apple’s macOS does certain things great, there are certain apps that users need to use that simply aren’t available for Mac. As a result, they will need to use Boot Camp or another virtualization software like Parallels. Unfortunately, it seems that Boot Camp will not be supported by Apple’s upcoming ARM-based Mac computers.

This was confirmed by Apple’s SVP of software engineering, Craig Federighi during the Daring Fireball podcast in which he was quoted as saying, “We’re not direct booting an alternate operating system. Purely virtualization is the route. These hypervisors can be very efficient, so the need to direct boot shouldn’t really be the concern.”

Previously, thanks to developer documentation in which Apple highlighted the various tools developers could use to make apps compatible with their ARM-based Macs, it was suggested that apps such as Boot Camp would not work, which has since been confirmed by Federighi himself during the podcast.

The good news is that as per Federighi’s statement, virtualization will still be supported, meaning that you can still run Windows apps on ARM-based Macs, although this will not be supported by the Rosetta 2 translation technology, and these virtualization apps will also need to be fully rebuilt.

However, as The Verge points out, it could be a bit of a licensing nightmare to get Windows running on ARM, so it remains to be seen whether or not apps such as VMWare or Parallels will be bothered to do this.

Tyler Lee
Categories: Apple, Computers
Tags: macOS, Microsoft, Windows, Windows 10