How to Install Windows 11 on Apple M1 Macs in 2022!

The moment many of us have been waiting for has finally happened, Parallels 16 has been updated with full support for Apple's M1 Macs, resulting in much better performance running the ARM version of Windows 10 as I'm gonna show you guys in this video with some benchmarks and gaming footage. And the best part is that it's actually pretty quick and simple to get it installed on your M1 Mac, in fact, I actually think it's even quicker than installing bootcamp on Intel-based Macs, so I've gotta be honest, the future for Apple Silicon Macs is looking very bright. Now before I get into the improved performance of Parallels 16.5 in Windows 10, before we get into that, let me first show you how to set the entire thing up step-by-step so you can get it running on your M1 Mac. First of all, you'll need to download the latest version of Parallels by going to their website and simply clicking download now. They do offer a full 14-day free trial, so I would go with that option to try it out, and it should start downloading automatically. Once finished, open the DMG file within your downloads folder, and then double-click on the icon that pops up to begin. Then go through the next couple of prompts, and once it's finished installing, accept the license agreement and give Parallels access to the folders that it needs to properly run. It's gonna let you know that your Mac has an M1 chip, so click continue. And at this point, we're gonna need to get the Windows VHDX file. Head to Google and type in Windows Insider Program. Click on the first result and then click on the register button. In order to do that, you're gonna have to sign into your account, so go ahead and do that now. When you're logged in, you'll be sent to this page, and as you can see, I've already So instead, you'll see a register button, and there are just a couple of prompts and agreements to go through and then it'll let you know that you've joined. Head to Google again and type in Windows 10 on ARM Insider Preview. Then click the first result, and then right here, you'll be able to download the VHDX file that we need, which is a pretty large 9.1GB. Once it's finished, just drag and drop it onto the center of the installation page, and then click continue. I then chose the games only option since that's what I'll be using it for, and I also checked the customize settings box as well before clicking create. After a while, the settings will pop up, and as you can see in the CPU and memory settings, the default is set to 4 CPU cores and 4GB of RAM. Now if you have the 16GB M1 Mac model, which I definitely recommend getting, then you can set it to 8GB or even 12GB if you'd like to. And then once you're finished with that, hit continue, go through the rest of the prompts, and then after just a bit, the installation will be complete. At that point, you'll need to either log in or create an account, then accept the agreements, and then you'll be completely finished. At this point, I went ahead and downloaded Steam and Battle.net from the web to get ready to download some games. Now I've gotta say that the main benefit of Parallels is that you can easily swap between macOS and Windows by pressing Command plus Tab on your keyboard, or swiping with three fingers on your trackpad. You can also pause your virtual machine by switching to macOS, then clicking on the Parallels icon in the menu bar, clicking on actions, and then pause virtual machine. Now when you swipe back to Windows, you can see that it's paused and it's not taking up any additional resources. And then to unpause, simply click on it and you're ready to go. And then if you ever want to shut it down completely, just shut it down using the Windows button in the bottom left corner like you usually would on your PC. And there you guys go, that was the full guide on how to install Windows 10 on an M1 Mac using Parallels, and now, let's get into the fun part, the benchmarks and gaming tests! As you guys can see, I have Geekbench 5 open right here, and you'll notice that it says 6 processors, 6 cores. That's because I actually went into the settings and adjusted it and set it to 6 cores and 6GB of RAM, and testing it out, it actually works pretty fine so I went with that. So we've got all this right here, it does not let you do the graphics test for some reason because I guess it can't detect it because it's integrated and unified, but let's run the CPU benchmark. Now while this is running, I do want to strongly recommend getting 16GB of RAM if you're gonna be running Parallels or playing games, you really want 16GB. Alright, we have our score, and this is absolutely insane, I cannot believe that the new version is running this well, when they say native, they really mean native. We're getting a single-core score of 1541 and 5682 for multi-core, that is incredible because this is an 8GB machine running through a virtual machine. Now look at this score and compare it to what you would get on macOS, and the difference actually isn't that big, but here's the incredible part. Check out the score of the latest Dell XPS 13 with literally the best Intel laptop chip that they have right now. This virtual machine is beating the best Intel laptop chip, I cannot believe that this is happening. But wait, it gets even better because that Dell was running while plugged in, check out what happens when you unplug it and run it on battery powered. Yes, the performance goes way, way down, it's just kind of hilarious and a little bit sad at this point that the M1 is running through a virtual machine and it's killing the Dell that's natively running x86. So yeah, who knew that we would be getting performance like this only a few months after the M1 Mac came out with a brand new CPU architecture, that's just crazy. And now let's finally get into the gaming, and while we did have some success, we had a couple of failures. I downloaded Battle.net, the launcher, and I tried to play Overwatch, I tried to play Cold War, I tried to play Warcraft 3, and none of them would even launch, so that is a massive bummer because I really like those games, but it seems like that's an issue with the Battle.net launcher and there's some kind of bug that just won't let the games run, so that really sucks. Now someone did suggest to download a couple of extra Windows files, specifically the DirectX end-user runtime by going to this page and also the x64 version of Visual C++, but unfortunately, that didn't help for those games either. In fact, most games that use an anti-cheat system for online multiplayer will not work either, so that really really sucks, but we do expect those systems to get updated to allow ARM-based chips sometime in the future, since CSGO currently works perfectly fine on M1 Macs and that also has an anti-cheat system. But thankfully, a couple of games on Steam did work, and here you guys can see that we have Final Fantasy 7, Final Fantasy X, and Grand Theft Auto 5 all installed and they all work. So let's start out with Final Fantasy because that's very nostalgic and as you know, it does not work on Mac, it's not supported on macOS, so the only way to play it is to run it through Windows 10, and it works, so let's play it. Alright guys, look at it, it's working! Nostalgic! So no glitches, no issues, limit, braver, let's go! Over here in the corner, it looks like we're locked to a nice 15 FPS, perfect! Now I'm pretty sure this game actually runs, probably like something like, I don't know, something like that. There you go! He's dead. Look at that guys, that was fun. And now let's get into Final Fantasy X right here, watch this, even more nostalgic music right here. Nice. Alright, we're here in the settings, we've got 1440x900, that's the highest I can go because it's probably like basic native, but everything else I turned up as high as possible, so there you guys go, 30 FPS, no glitching, no nothing. It's very interesting because the last time that I did this, I tried to play this game and I was getting a lot of glitching for some reason, but now, no issues. Great, yeah! Got it! There you go. Boom! Anyway, it seems like I haven't played this in a while, I'm about to lose, but yeah, everything's working perfectly fine, so now let's go ahead and move on to Grand Theft Auto 5. Now I did initially have some issues running Grand Theft Auto 5, but I went online and I downloaded the Rockstar Social Games Club launcher separately, and then after that I was able to log in and get it to run properly. Everything's working, it's definitely not perfect, it's not the best FPS, unfortunately the counter is not working, but we're getting playable performance. Now this is impressive, because let me remind you, this is running through a virtual machine, and then on top of that, Windows within that virtual machine is emulating x86, and on top of that, this is a base model with 8GB of RAM, and it's only giving 6 to the virtual machine, this is just insane. And look at this, it's not perfect, but graphics actually do look pretty good. But let me show you the settings, if I go over to the graphics, you can see that I'm playing at 1920x1200 resolution, that's higher than 1080p, 60hz, and let me remind you, set your VSync to half, that's the best performance that I'm able to get by using that, otherwise you get a lot of glitchiness, so make sure that is on. If you were to play this on a 13-inch Intel MacBook Pro base model, it would probably do worse than this, because the Intel integrated graphics is horrible, and the best part, swipe, you're back on macOS, thanks to Parallels, it's amazing. But yeah, there you guys go, that's how to get Windows 10 running, probably with the best performance out of any other method with the new Parallels 16.5 update, and looking at that Geekbench performance that we got, being better than the best Intel laptop chip, that is just incredible and I'm so impressed and excited for more software to start supporting ARM and M1 and Apple Silicon chips. The future is gonna look amazing, especially when we get those M1X MacBook Pros or potentially the iMac next week which I really think is gonna happen, so yeah, hopefully you guys enjoyed this video, and if you did, go ahead and tap that like button and click that circle above to subscribe for more videos like this one, and we'll see you in the next one!