It may be to avoid appearing to be misleading. They'll almost certainly be able to virtualize ARM-based Windows, but that's not what normal users are looking for when they want to virtualize Windows.

How many people still use Parallels or other virtualization for their Macs?

I've stopped doing that years ago. No need now - if you want to play Windows games, buy a PC - it's a lot cheaper.

Still alot, I'd reason.

Especially – and funnily enough – in business contexts, where you need to run software which are each only available on either Mac or Windows, but not both.

Do you have any examples? I was running VMWare Fusion until about 2015 for my office laptop for Visio and Project, at which point I felt no need on my next refresh to simply not request it due to cloud-based alternatives.

Yes, the NURBS (surface) modeler "Rhino" is one – or rather was; meanwhile it got a Mac version, but that one still has no feature parity, so you would still see this running in Parallels somewhere, I guess.

I don't.

I used Parallels for a while, and it was great, but then we kind of standardized on VirtualBox at work. It was okay.

But then our dev environments got too big to run on laptops, so now they're all cloud-hosted VMs. We still run Docker (which uses a VM under the covers for Mac) but that uses Apple's Hypervisor framework and isn't really "user-facing" virtualization.

Why not? Windows 10 for ARM can run x86 apps.

...very poorly. And only 32-bit apps.

Yes. It appears that Rosetta 2 beats Microsoft's x86 emulation by a long shot. I wonder how they're avoiding Intel patents.

What patents? All Apple is doing is translating x86 instructions to ARM instructions, they’re not emulating the processor.

Keep in mind that current macOS runs ONLY 64-bit x86 apps and interestingly Windows on ARM emulates ONLY 32-bit apps. Since 64-bit extensions were designed by AMD, maybe they have some deal with them?

I did not know that.

Perhaps it's just to temper expectations then. If the performance or user experience isn't comparable to what today's users expect, it's probably better not to celebrate that use case.

> Why not? Windows 10 for ARM can run x86 apps.

Nobody who has ever attempted to use it would claim this.

Why?

Because to all intents and purposes it doesn't work.

I wouldn't expect Windows for ARM to run on Apple's custom chips.

I noticed that too. Might have trademark or legal reasons though. Technically, if they're able to dynamically translate x86 to ARM as they've explicitly stated (with JIT of JS and the JVM as the example) they should be able to dynamically translate x86 VMs regardless of what OS they contain, which would allow x86 Windows to be virtualized with better-than-interpreted performance.

Or at least that's what I hope ;-) I'm relying on running x86 Windows and Linux within Parallels in addition to native MacOS Apps to do my daily work, which involves compiling and testing x86 binaries for these platforms, so whether this virtualization thing actually runs x86 OSes transparently is an absolute make-or-break feature for me to continue my usage of the MacOS platform for work.

I don’t think that would perform very well without some hardware support for it as well. Not an expert on this by any stretch but as I understand it modern virtualization is almost always hardware accelerated which I can’t imagine is a viable option if you’re translating the binaries with Rosetta.

I would guess that their Intel emulation doesn't support 32-bit x86, which many, many Windows apps depend on.

Indeed - only talked about Linux, of which there are of course ARM versions available.

Yeah, but what I care about is being able to run Docker with x86 containers so that I can use the same containers on my laptop as my servers.

Not all packages are available in ARM flavors.

Indeed - and I'm hoping they give some more details about that, whether it's ARM only virtualisation, or if their Rosetta 2 also supports x86 virtualisation.

Their dev documentation states that rosetta is only for user mode emulation.

That’s got to be coming, but maybe just wasn’t ready to demo today.