Parallels issues second Technical Preview for M1 Macs with new features, bug fixes

Credit: Parallels

Parallels on Tuesday released a second Technical Preview of its virtualization software for M1-equipped Macs.

The updated Technical Preview introduces new features and improvements, including support for suspending and resuming a virtual machine, support for installing Parallels Tools in several Linux distributions, and automatic detection of compatible Linux installation images.

Additionally, the update improves the overall stability of Parallels on Apple Silicon and patches a few known issues with the previous version.

Like the first Technical Preview, there are still limitations here. Users can only install ARM-based operating systems and ARM32 applications aren't supported.

Parallels will be able to run the ARM version of Windows that's available through Microsoft's Windows Insider program. Currently, however, there's no publicly available version of Windows for ARM.

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

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6 Comments

nosleepapnea

said about 3 years ago

Please clarify if this will run with 8GB ram on the M1 or does it need 16GB to be practical? Especially since one of your reviews implied 8GB of ram on M1 was similar to 16GB ram on Intel Mac.

mr lizard

said about 3 years ago

nosleepapnea said:

Please clarify if this will run with 8GB ram on the M1 or does it need 16GB to be practical? Especially since one of your reviews implied 8GB of ram on M1 was similar to 16GB ram on Intel Mac.

You should post this on the Parallels support forum.

commentzilla

said about 3 years ago

nosleepapnea said:

Please clarify if this will run with 8GB ram on the M1 or does it need 16GB to be practical? Especially since one of your reviews implied 8GB of ram on M1 was similar to 16GB ram on Intel Mac.

I have no doubt it will run but you'll probably drop straight into swap memory from the start, especially if you're using an external monitor. If your a developer or any kind of power user I doubt 8GB is going to cut it. Think of it this way, the 8GB model probably has 4GB free from the start with some basic apps open, while a 16GB would have 12GB or three times that. It's that initial overhead which puts the 8GB model at a substantial disadvantage. Swap memory works great but on the M1 but it may start to drag when once its double the size of your free memory.

I run a lot of apps on my 16GB model with 2TB SSD and I only hit a hard limit once at around 20GB of swap (roughly double 12GB) with 4 Adobe apps and another half-dozen apps open with other background processes running. But the 2TB model has another advantage, the SSD is faster.

jdb8167

said about 3 years ago

mr lizard said:

nosleepapnea said:

Please clarify if this will run with 8GB ram on the M1 or does it need 16GB to be practical? Especially since one of your reviews implied 8GB of ram on M1 was similar to 16GB ram on Intel Mac.

You should post this on the Parallels support forum.

I don't think Microsoft has posted minimum specs for Windows on ARM publicly but generally they recommend 2 GB or greater for the 64-bit x86 architecture. Their previous Windows 10 Mobile for ARM was even lower at 1 GB. I'd imagine that giving Parallels 4 GB for a Windows VM should be sufficient to run reasonably well. I don't think you would want to run too much other Mac software at the same time though.