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Comment by zerr | Hacker News Reader

What's Win10/11 story on m1 macs?

Wholly dependent on Microsoft. So far, they didn't say anything apart from indicating last year that they don't have immediate plans to do it.

> Wholly dependent on Microsoft.

Not wholly, surely? As an OEM, Apple would need to provide drivers. Given that their system isn’t an off-the-shelf SBBR/ServerReady ARM64 device, that’s going to be a not-insignificant amount of work that isn’t Microsoft’s responsibility.

Seeing as the Asahi Linux project has had to reverse-engineer pretty much everything, I don’t see how Microsoft could be totally on the hook.

It's precisely it not being a SystemReady ARM64 device that makes it Microsoft's responsibility. The Windows kernel requires core changes to support this hardware; it cannot be done with just drivers. Nobody can make Windows work on this without Microsoft's help. Same reason we had to make a few changes to core Linux plumbing, besides adding drivers.

Ah, thanks for the explanation! That makes sense.

Apple has publicly stated that they’re willing to do that, but Microsoft refuses to license Windows for the M1: https://www.macrumors.com/2020/11/20/craig-federighi-on-wind...

I'm surprised Apple stated that as macOS (ARM) have stretchy support for dual booting, even with two macOS version installed. So how could Apple be willing to do that if they haven't flesh out the dual-booting for Apple Silicon? Strange they passes the ball to Microsoft (deflecting to their competitor) whereas Apple should be holding the ball until it is capable enough.

Microsoft doesn't offer Windows 11 unless it is bundled with hardware. I am sure that if Apple wishes to sell Macbook Pro with Windows, Apple could reach out and Microsoft would be interested. But I really doubt that Apple would want to go down this route.

Eh? You can go out and buy a retail copy of Windows 11 from loads of places without hardware. E.g. here in the UK Scan, Ebuyer, Insight, etc. All major software/hardware sellers.

My bad. I should have specified Windows 11 ARM.

Bare metal Win10/11 ARM is non functional on the M1 machines, Virtualised is officially unsupported [1], there is no apparent talk of official support for either in the rumour mill. However it wouldn't surprise me if there was a working dev build in Redmond somewhere.

[1] - https://www.theregister.com/2021/09/10/windows_11_m1/

Buy a copy of Parallels, run the Windows 11 ARM64 insider preview in a VM. Works pretty great for everything but gaming.

If you want to activate it, use slmgr with some sketchy third party KMS server.

Won't happen because it would work against their Surface efforts, I think

for a software-focussed company like Microsoft to deny running Windows on the M1 seems very strange to me…

if MSFT is serious about (eventually) transitioning to ARM for the majority of consumer-oriented Windows machines, it surely makes sense for them to provide support for the most adopted ARM-based laptop and desktop platform out there… to bolster development of ARM-native applications for Windows on ARM, if nothing else.

i don’t own either machine — but i imagine the ARM-based Surface Pro X would make a miserable development experience, especially compared to a hypothetical Windows on M1(X) MacBooks.

we shall see i suppose, but i would be very surprised if we never see it happen.

no such story

"The End."

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