Parallels Desktop 16.5
The best way to run Windows apps on an M1 Mac – but it’s not yet a fully stable proposition
PRICE Perpetual licence, £67 (£80 inc VAT); annual subscription, £58 (£70 inc VAT) per year from parallels.com
After 16 major releases, you might think there’s not much left to be added to Parallels Desktop – and for the vast majority of Mac owners who are still using
Intel CPUs, there isn’t. For them, this update tidies up a few bugs and adds support for the latest version of the Linux kernel, but that’s largely it. Overall, it’s not even consequential enough to warrant a full ticking up of the version number.
Yet this could possibly be the most significant release of Parallels since it first appeared in 2006. Just as version one unlocked the potential of Apple’s then-recent switch to the Intel architecture, this update breaks new ground by allowing you to install and run Windows 10 on Apple Silicon.
It’s an enticing prospect, but not as straightforward as it sounds. It would be a huge technical challenge to run a standard x86 build of Windows 10 on Apple’s ARM-based M1 chip, and Parallels doesn’t attempt it. Rather, the focus is on Microsoft’s own port of Windows 10 for ARM processors: you can now run Windows on ARM (WOA) in a VM on the M1 platform. And since the OS includes an Intel translation layer, it opens the door to running a huge range of Windows apps on the latest Macs.
The catch is that while Parallels Desktop may be ready for WOA, the OS itself is still a work in progress. Early versions have trickled out on a few lightweight laptops – notably Microsoft’s own Surface Pro X ( see
issue 306, p68) – but the only way to get an installer for your Mac is via the free Windows Insider Program, which means you can expect betaquality code with no guarantees of performance or stability.
First steps
Virtualisation can be a complicated business, but Parallels makes it pretty painless. Once you have installed the app on an M1-powered Mac, it prompts you to pick a guest OS, with helpful links to ready-to-roll images for Ubuntu 20.04 LTS, Debian 10.7, Fedora Workstation 33-1.2 and Kali Linux 2021.1. This is a nice spread of options, but we doubt many people are really buying Parallels to run Linux, especially inside a host OS that’s already built on Unix.
Happily, installing Windows is almost as easy. Microsoft provides the WOA installer in the form of a VHDX image file, which you can simply drag onto the Parallels window and boot to kick off the installation. There’s nothing to customise on the OS side: accept Parallels’ default settings and you’ll be looking at a Windows 10 desktop in no more than ten minutes.
Once you’ve got past the thrill of seeing Windows boot up on your Mac desktop, the experience is pretty anticlimactic. WOA looks and feels exactly like regular Windows 10, and it works like it too: initial releases were limited to running 32-bit code, but that restriction is now gone, and I installed and used a whole stack of industry-standard apps and tools with zero fuss, including Chrome, Office, Photoshop, 7-Zip and Zoom. I’m not suggesting that it makes sense to run these apps in Parallels, but they show how broadly Windows on ARM can stand in for the x86 edition.
Anything in the Microsoft Store ought to work too, since WOA fully implements the Universal Windows Platform (UWP) framework, and any other required resources should come bundled into the installation package. In fact, when I tried to set up the Dropbox client, the regular installer detected a platform error and smartly directed me to install the Store edition instead, which worked perfectly.
As usual with VMs, Windows appears as a desktop in a window, but with a click you can enable Parallels’
“Accept Parallels’ default settings and you’ll be looking at a Windows 10 desktop in no more than ten minutes”
signature Coherence mode. This lets Windows applications float among your Mac windows, and puts their icons in the Dock alongside native apps. Your personal folders in Windows are mapped directly to their Mac equivalents, helping to smooth out crossplatform workflows, and you can even copy and paste text and images between Windows apps and Mac ones.
This being a virtual machine, you can also take snapshots of your Windows system and roll back to previous states. This could be useful if you just need to use Windows from time to time to accomplish a specific task and don’t want to worry about cruft or malware accumulating.
Hitches and hurdles
While Parallels has a good go at integrating Windows apps into the Mac environment, some dissonance is unavoidable. For example, apps from different platforms have their window controls at opposite corners, and the modifier keys on the Mac keyboard are in a different order to Windows, which tends to mess with my brain.
And while WOA works very well with modern apps, older software is more hit and miss. For example, I use an ageing edition of Magix Sound Forge 11 for audio editing. This works perfectly well on my “real” Windows 10 desktop, but it refused to install in WOA, complaining that a DLL couldn’t be registered. I tried to roll back further to version 9, but this demanded the .NET Framework 2, and my attempts to install it were rewarded only with error codes.
The connecting together of the
Mac and Windows file systems can confuse some apps too. Macrium Reflect couldn’t handle the fact that my Desktop folder wasn’t located on a real hard disk and crashed at the start of the installation. On that note, anything with bespoke hardware drivers is likely to struggle too.
This sort of thing matters because one of the most common use cases for virtualisation is to keep alive legacy software that’s not supported on the new OS. It’s not at all surprising if apps from the XP or Windows 7 era don’t work on this new architecture, but it’s a shame.
And don’t forget that the OS is, at present, an Insider release. This means it receives large and frequent updates. It’s possible that new builds will progressively make more apps and devices work in WOA, but they may also unpredictably change and even break things.
Walking in parallel
By default, Parallels Desktop allocates two of the M1’s eight processor cores to your virtual WOA machine, along with 3GB of RAM. You can raise it to a maximum of four CPU cores and 8GB of RAM – or higher if you’ve sprung for a Pro subscription at £80 per year – but doing so leaves fewer resources for macOS. However you slice it, it’s no recipe for peak performance.
On top of that, most of the programs you’re currently likely to want to run in Windows are going to have to go through Intel emulation, and this drags performance down. I used Parallels Desktop to run standard benchmark suite on WOA on an 8GB Mac mini and it was hard to be delighted about the eventual score of only 23 – a long way off the 223 achieved by the same hardware using ARM-native software in macOS. Even if you give Windows four cores to play with, performance only scales linearly to an overall of 45.
Still, this doesn’t make WOA unusable. Performance is on par with a lightweight Windows laptop from 2015, and while I wouldn’t want to do everything in that environment, it’s fine for the odd individual task. Since the Windows system itself is running natively on ARM, the whole caboodle feels more responsive than you’d expect – and there’s surely scope to improve translation performance in future builds.
Final decision
Only six months after the M1 chip was unveiled, Parallels Desktop 16.5 gives it a new dimension of potential. For that, it feels absurdly cheap, with the standard edition costing a flat £80. Alternatively, you can sign up for a rolling subscription, but at £70 per year it’s not a great deal. As I’ve mentioned, there’s a subscriptiononly Pro edition for £80 a year, which lets you virtualise up to 32 cores and 128GB of RAM as well as adding advanced developer features, and a business edition at the same price that focuses on centralised deployment and management.
The fly in the ointment is WOA itself. It’s a work-inprogress OS with unpredictable app compatibility – and so far Microsoft hasn’t made any real commitment to its future. In two years, it could either be a thriving companion to the Intel build or an abandoned experiment.
For now, Parallels is an impressive proof of concept, and a fun and useful tool for tinkerers. Whether it becomes a true landmark release is down to Microsoft. Parallels deserves praise here, but most people should wait for the OS to at least reach a first stable public release before they invest in the idea of Windows on Apple Silicon.