Parallels Confirms Support For Apple’s M1 Chipset

When Apple Silicon was first unveiled earlier this year, it was revealed that to help developers make the transition, they would release the Rosetta 2 translation software that would allow x86 apps to run on their chipset.

There were some limitations, such as how Rosetta 2 would not work with Virtual Machine apps that virtualize x86_64 platforms, which meant that tools like Boot Camp and Parallels, which is one of the more popular programs that people use to run Windows apps on macOS, would not work. However, there is some good news on that front, in which Parallels has announced that they’ll be developing a new version of their software that will support Apple’s new M1 chipset.

The company has announced that they are working on this new software designed for the M1, so it should be noted that the current version of Parallels will not work on Apple’s new Mac computers. There’s no word on when this new M1-supported version of Parallels will be released, but if you do rely quite a bit on Parallels, then this is good news.

There is no word from other developers of virtualization software if they’ll be developing an M1 version as well, so for now it looks like Parallels will be the only one. According to the developers, “Since WWDC, our new version of Parallels Desktop which runs on Mac with Apple M1 chip has made tremendous progress. We switched Parallels Desktop to universal binary and optimized its virtualization code; and the version that we are eager to try on these new MacBook Air, Mac mini and MacBook Pro 13″ looks very promising.”

That being said, we have to wonder how this works. This is because the new M1 chipsets are ARM-based which means that it probably won’t be able to run the x86 version of Windows, and might need to run Windows 10 on ARM, which in turn raises the question of app compatibility and availability, but we’ll have to wait and see how it plays out.

Tyler Lee
Categories: Apple, Computers
Tags: m1, macOS, Parallels, Windows 10