3 limitations when using Windows 11 on Macbook M1 and M2

Recently, Microsoft has officially allowed the installation of Windows 11 on Mac computers using Apple M1 and M2 CPUs through a tutorial article. Immediately, this has received strong praise from users because many applications or jobs can only be done on Windows 11.

How Macbook supports Windows

In a new support article, Microsoft has "authorised" using Parallels Desktop 18 to run ARM versions of Windows 11 Pro and Enterprise on M1 and M2-based Macbooks. If you need Windows to work, you can use this method to be able to use Windows on your Macbook.

According to the introduction from Parallels Desktop 18, this solution allows the Windows operating system to actually run on Macbook hardware and in parallel with MacOS. However, this is the optimal version of Windows 11 on ARM because the M1 and M2 chips both use this architecture. Meanwhile, standard Windows 11 is mainly optimized for Intel/AMD chips. With that, Windows users on Macbooks face certain limitations.

Unable to run 32-bit ARM applications

Because Microsoft doesn't use 32-bit software for all Windows ARM builds. Devices won't work unless they have Windows 11 ARM drivers. Users cannot use anything that depends on another emulator layer, such as Android applications, Linux operating systems, and Windows Sandbox.

Can't play many games

It's also hard for Windows users on Macbooks to play games, as anything that requires at least DirectX 12 or OpenGL 3.3 won't work on a version of Windows that supports Parallels Desktop to run on a Macbook.

The operation is not as smooth as

Some users said that after the installation, the sliding operation on Macbook running Windows is not really smooth and happy like on MacOS. This is really unavoidable. However, if the experience is not too demanding, this is an acceptable problem.

Lesley Montoya

Update 08 May 2023