Instead, Setup went right into that series of screens that begins with “Hi” and opened the desktop and the Installation Assistant told me it was done.Īfter signing into my Parallels account and activating my Parallels Desktop for Mac Pro Edition, I was presented with the Windows 11 EULA.īut I wasn’t done: the next step was to activate Windows 11. But this time it worked, blowing right past the screen where it had hung before: the white intro screen to the Out of Box Experience (OOBE) appeared, but not the OOBE. Anyway, it was quick, and Windows Setup began again as before. Which required me to download Windows 11 again for some reason. So I stopped the install and restarted the process. But installing Windows 11 took a bit longer: it started normally but hung on a “Just a moment…” screen for a long time. And then I was prompted to install Windows 11.Ĭuriously, that also took just a few minutes. That took just a few minutes and didn’t require any reboots. So I factory reset the Mac, brought it back up new, updated it to the latest macOS version, and then installed Parallels Desktop 18 straightaway. I had already installed Parallels Desktop 18 late last summer, but I wanted to start fresh. But with that complete-the house is sold and we’ll move out in late March-I ran over to the storage unit, grabbed the Mac, and took a look. There was just one problem: my wife and I are in the process of moving and my MacBook Pro was hidden away in a storage unit while we showed the house to potential buyers. Naturally, I wanted to test how this works and experience Parallels’ simple new onboarding process.

But what is new is that Microsoft now officially supports this configuration: previously, Mac users who needed to run a Windows app locally had to make do with a Windows Insider Preview version of Windows 11 on Arm that was not supported by Microsoft and had to be laboriously kept up-to-date as new builds were released. This information isn’t new, and it’s been true ever since Parallels released an Apple Silicon-compatible version of its virtualization platform, despite Qualcomm’s steady progress on the in-house chipsets used in newer PCs like the ThinkPad X13s. But until that happens, there’s only one truly great way to run Windows 11 on Arm. Granted, that could change: Qualcomm should announce its first Nuvia-based Arm chipsets for chipsets later this year, and the first PCs based on these chipsets should arrive in early 2024.

But with Windows 11 on Arm, it might not be a lie: Windows 11 on Arm seems to run better in a Parallels Desktop 18-based virtualized environment than it does on native Arm PC hardware.

For years, Mac enthusiasts have spread the lie that the best way to run Windows was on a Mac.

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