Parallels 16 for Apple Silicon M1 Mac launches in beta - minus Intel OS support

Popular virtualization software Parallels now supports Apple Silicon in an invite-only Technical Preview — with notable caveats.

Parallels showcased an Apple Silicon version of its software at WWDC 2020, but this Technical Preview is the first time the company has made its virtualization app available to M1 Mac users. Parallels is sending invite emails, viewed by AppleInsider, with installation instructions.

The Technical Preview has some strict limits in its current state. It only works on M1 Macs, and you can only install system images of ARM-based operating systems. Intel-based OS images are not supported.

The only way to run Windows in the Technical Preview is to sign up for Microsoft's Insider program and download the Windows 10 Client ARM64 Insider Preview VHDX file. The Parallels preview will recognize the file and create a Windows 10 on ARM virtual machine.

Furthermore, the preview is not yet compatible with existing disk images used in previous versions of Parallels. The beta also doesn't support suspending and resuming virtual machines, and users will need to shut down the VM to close the app.

Parallels is among a group of virtualization software developers scrambling to solve Apple Silicon's unique challenges. Competing developers behind Docker and VMWare also plan on updating their applications for the M1 chips.

After Apple had announced the first Apple Silicon Macs in November, Parallels said it was "excited to see the performance, power efficiency, and virtualization features" and had promised "tremendous progress" made since the annual conference.

If you own an M1 Mac, you can request access to the Technical Preview here.

18 Comments

commentzilla 769 comments · 10 Years

About 3 years ago

So fairly useless at this point without Windows for ARM and absent of so many things that made it useful before.

mjtomlin 2690 comments · 20 Years

commentzilla said:

So fairly useless at this point without Windows for ARM and absent of so many things that made it useful before.

My need negates your need, so no, it's not at all useless.

I run an OpenBSD web server, I'll be happy when I can switch it over to my M1 Mac mini.

cloudguy 323 comments · 4 Years

Docker, Parallels, VMWare ... one of these things is not like the other.

commentzilla said:

So fairly useless at this point without Windows for ARM and absent of so many things that made it useful before.

Says you. Much of the population these days have no use for Windows at all. (Not a Windows hater, quite the contrary, just stating a fact). Especially developers, 35% of whom use Linux exclusively, and a bunch more only use Linux and macOS. This group won't bat an eye at Windows not being available, but will welcome the ability to run Linux in VirtualBox, VMWare and Parallels when the Pro M1 Mac configurations come out in 2021.

speakingmywords 8 comments · 8 Years

Most corporate linux instances are on Intel gear. So really, unless you're using this for your personal website, internal network, etc... this is a toy release. My company is a software developer and our product are on Intel Linux systems. M1 is great, but if I can't get our software images to run on M1 virtualization software, nothing will convince them to buy M1 laptops for us.

jdb8167 626 comments · 16 Years

commentzilla said:

So fairly useless at this point without Windows for ARM and absent of so many things that made it useful before.

If Microsoft makes it legal to use Windows on Arm in a VM on macOS then this will be very useful. Right now QEmu works with WoA and testers are saying the latest win32/win64 translation/emulation is reasonably fast on the M1. I'm not involved with the Windows Insider program and have no real interest in Windows but I've used QEmu, vftool, simpleVM, and Docker to run Linux and they all seem to work just fine. I'm just waiting on information on how to boot Big Sur in a VM and my virtual machine needs are met.