Important differences between the experience of running Windows 11 on Macs with Intel vs Apple silicon.

To preface, Fusion is able to create virtual machines by making explicit use of specialized CPU features and operating system APIs which Apple provides. It does not mimic or “emulate” a different CPU for virtual machines. As such, an operating system must be designed for the type of CPU it will be running on, regardless of if it’s virtualized or physically installed.

“Apple silicon” is a new “System on a Chip” (SOC) design from Apple which does not use the Intel™ CPU or its design which is often referred to as “x86”. However, the architecture of the CPU in the SOC is compatible with Arm™, Inc. architecture. This means that on Macs with Apple silicon, Fusion can only run operating systems that are arm64 or aarch64 based (often used interchangeably).

This holds true for Windows on Macs with Apple silicon in that you must use the Arm variant of Windows 11.

• Because there are no Arm variants of older Windows operating systems, such as Windows XP, Windows 7, Windows 8, Windows Vista, etc. they will not function on Macs with Apple silicon.
• While Windows 10 for Arm does exist, it is not expected to be fully supported in the same way that Windows 11 for Arm is, and the built-in “Get Windows” feature only supports Windows 11.
• Windows 11 for Arm does provide an application-based emulation layer for running Intel-based Windows applications, including games, that use DirectX 11 3D graphics. Fusion 13.5 and later supports this explicitly.

Development of Fusion’s features on Apple silicon is an ongoing project, and at this time there are known limitations when comparing the x86 and the Arm variants of Windows 11.

The below table illustrates those differences.