Windows on the M1 Mac - What are your options?

Key Takeaways

what is up data nerds so apple recently switched from using intel chips to the new and improved m1 chips in their macs and so what does this mean for users that are looking to use windows on their macbooks or mac minis with previous macs that were used in the intel chip they had the same architecture as a lot of windows machines using the x86 architecture and so therefore it was an ease and there was a lot of different options available to run windows but now since mac has switched to the m1 chip which uses the arm architecture windows needs to get developed further to run on this arm architecture so the options are a lot more limited if you're new here i'm luke a data analyst and my channel is all about tech and skills for data science and for this video today we're going to be going over what are the most popular options for getting windows on your new m1 macbooks we're going to be looking at four different options and that's going to be dual boot using bootcamp assistant virtual machines using parallels windows compatibility layer using wine and then finally desktop as a service using amazon workspaces so with that let's jump right in for the first option let's look at dual boot or multi-boot and i should say the lack of option for this and what is dual boot or multi-boot normally your hard drive is a single partition and that just means it's it's not broken up it's uh the sign the resources to all of the hard drive and this hard drive has a single operating system on it so whenever you start up your computer it goes to and loads this operating system under your computer for a dual boot or a multi-loop what we do is we divide this hard drive into multiple pieces of two in this case and you put one operating system on one side and another on the other and then during startup you can select which operating system in our case mac os or windows to actually boot up and utilize for the cpu and the computer resources so as far as options for dual boot on your windows machine they have a boot camp assistant which is an application internal to mac os but if you go to actually launch that application you'll get a warning message saying that it's not available to you be used and that's because of the licensing of windows on an arm machine the actual licensing of that os for windows for arm is not allowed for the consumers right now so craig the svp of software engineering has said hey as soon as they update this and allow this we'll have windows on our macbook via bootcamp assistant so my thoughts on this is that i do expect windows to license windows for arm to basic consumers in the future because they want to make money so they're going to want to license this but as far as when's this going to happen there's been nothing that i've seen onto what a timetable is for this this really isn't an option as of january 2021 so let's look at some other options so the second option to look at is virtual machines and the most popular option for virtual machines is parallel which is actually demonstrated at the apples developer conference last year so as far as what is a virtual machine so you have your macbook and it's running its operating system itself from there on top of the operating system you have a virtual machine so the computer itself parallels in this case we're going to get to and from there that virtual machine can host its own operating system inside of it and then access the computer resources of the macbook in this case the thing is that the virtual machine has to be built on the same architecture or to handle the same architecture that the host computer has now that apple has shifted to this new arm architecture this has caused the virtual machines to have to switch to that new architecture as well rosetta 2 can't be used for this new architecture to host virtual machines is not allowed so what are the options available for virtual machines so parallels the most popular option does have a technical preview available that works on the arm architecture and you can go in and sign up for it and download it for free like i did next you need to sign up for the windows insider program and can then download the insider preview of windows 10 on arm so now you have the virtual machine itself that's built for the arma architecture and you have the operating system too that is built for the arm architecture and you can use this on the macbook when i went through and actually tested out parallels on the m1 macbook i thought it was really responsive and worked pretty quickly i didn't have any lag issues the one main caveat to this is some of the applications haven't been updated for this new arm architecture so a vital application microsoft store hasn't been updated so i can't even access microsoft store to get applications downloaded i tried to go to a backdoor route to install my favorite application power bi and when i went through the internet explorer i couldn't even access it to download it so my thoughts on this is that parallels as far as the virtual machine aspect goes to host different operating systems it's ready to go and can be used now if you wanted to but windows 10 on arm is not fully developed yet there still needs a lot of work to be done and some kinks need to be worked out because of that i'm going to say it's not a great option but it will most likely be the go-to option in the future for getting windows on your m1 macbook so moving on to the third option and that's a windows compatibility layer and the most popular option for this is wine which is an open source project so as far as what is going on with the windows compatibility layer for this we're not actually accessing windows operating system on a mac instead what we're doing is we're accessing the applications themselves that you may need so you can install windows windows-based applications on mac itself and it uses uh somewhat of an emulator to actually allow you to access those applications and in some cases it can actually be faster than the normal architecture so as i mentioned wine is an open source project and the most popular option is crossover which uses this wine as a back end to allow you to get those applications onto your mac computer crossover itself can be easily downloaded from the internet it actually works through uh rosetta and so it works just fine with on your computer they do have a limited number of apps available and if an application isn't available you can download the exe file and then load it your own method but whenever i went through and tried to once again download my favorite application of power bi i had problems even installing it and getting it to work properly so my thoughts on this are that yes there are certain applications that you can get on your mac os and so definitely check this out because it's uh they do have a free trial available and it may be an option for you to use but right now i don't feel that this is the best option to use for getting windows applications on your macbook okay moving on to the fourth and final option and you're probably like luke do you have any good news for getting windows on a macbook and this is i feel the solution and the good news so what is desktop as a service and that's just a fancy way of saying hey a remote desktop and this is how you can access another machine through your macbook so we're not going to be running windows itself on this macbook we're going to be using a cloud or another computer to access windows and then we're just piping into it through some sort of remote desktop manager so as far as options go there's a lot of different options available because i mean this is fully developed it doesn't depend on the arm architecture but the most popular option that i found was amazon workspaces getting started with amazon workspaces is really simple you just go sign up for amazon web services from there you create a workspace instance and download the workspaces application to your macbook so that way you can pipe into this remote desktop and then from there in less than 20 minutes you will have access to this windows machine on your m1 macbook so of all the options i found that this was the quickest and most responsive as far as the interface into windows to use i went in and downloaded my favorite application of power bi and i was able to manipulate data and do some different things and i had no issues with it the thing that i found most impressive was that workspaces and the use of power bis was super responsive even more responsive than my shitty dell and it was sort of impressive because this has 16 gigabytes of ram and the instance i was using only had four gigabytes of ram and it was still going faster than this so my thoughts on this are obviously pretty clear i think this is the go-to option right now for getting windows on your m1 macbook so let's talk about i guess the one caveat and that's going to be what is the cost itself in my case i was using the free tier and that allows me to access this instance for up to two months and use it for 40 hours per month for free but when we have to start paying it's going to be about seven dollars a month and 30 cents per hour so i think this is a really good option for the time being to just pay this amount until parallels becomes fully developed and then you can get that and just pay that one time fee to access windows on your macbook bam so there you have it those are the options or future options for getting windows or windows applications on your m1 macbook if you have any questions on this drop them in the comments below as always smash that like button if you got value out of this and i'll see you in the next one [Music] you