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Comment by smith7018 | Hacker News Reader

You might have noticed that you can't exactly purchase an ARM build of Windows, right? That's because Microsoft has an exclusivity deal with Qualcomm for Windows on ARM. Until that's over, there's no way for Apple to legally run Windows on their hardware nor make drivers for the platform. The ball has long been in Microsoft's court.

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Microsoft 'authorize' Windows 11 to run on Parallels desktop - https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/options-for-usin...

That website claims that license keys are platform agnostic.

I feel some distinctions could be made here.

I don't have a horse in any race or even know any of the facts. But it is entirely possible for the keys to be hardware agnostic and for MS to have a deal with Qualcomm restricting getting Windows to run natively on Apple (or other random) hardware.

Edit: such a deal would not stop you or I from developing drivers, but it could stop Microsoft from lifting a finger to support that.

https://github.com/AmpereComputing/Windows-11-On-Ampere

I dont't care much for Windows, but I've been virtualizing pre-release arm64 Windows 11 on macOS since 2021.

But you haven’t been running it natively which is what we’re talking about

I don’t care much for it either but lazy game devs only know directX it seems. I’m curious about the performance through a virtualization layer though. You think you lose too much performance or do the m series just muscle it through? M3 is over 4Ghz per core now seems plenty beefy.

https://www.tomshardware.com/news/ampere-64-core-arm-worksta...

There are rumors that will end later this year - https://stratechery.com/2024/an-interview-with-arm-ceo-rene-... (search for 'exclusive')

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