If you just want to play with windows on a Mac go for it… if you need to use office, install it on your Mac. I love my MacBook but I would never recommend that someone buy one with the intent of installing windows on a VM if they need windows for work. MS SQL server is not made for ARM chips and does not install correctly… you can install it but it’s buggy and sometimes services won’t start, config manager throws errors and reporting server and SSIS all need workarounds to work… and with the visual studio issues SSIS is a pain. I learned to watch my calendar and not trust that a meeting notification will pop up. Teams and outlook notifications are buggy in the VM. So I’d write them in the VM and then run them on the Mac… that’s a pain. When trying to execute a program it’s constantly trying to block the file because of the way parallels sets file permissions (if anyone knows a fix for that please share!) I ended up installing the Mac version of visual studio which doesn’t have all the features just so that I could open project files and run them. Visual studio does not play nice on the parallels VM at all. And for someone who isn’t writing code on Microsoft proprietary systems I am not sure what you would need windows for now that you can install OS365 right on your Mac.Ĭonstantly running into keyboard issues with the Mac keyboard on remote environments I really tried to make parallels work… but it’s just not great for a developer. In my most recent job I had to provide my own equipment. I really like have the separate OS for my photography and music and just whatever I want to do so it doesn’t look/feel like work. My situation is that I have always had a company provided laptop for work, and I’ve kept a MBP since around 2010 for my personal laptop. I started with the default parallels recommended (6) and had to up it to 8. I will say… it works… it’s buggy and there are work arounds you have to do but it works, and the performance when it works is acceptable if you have a machine where you can dedicate 8GB ram to the VM which is what my experience is. I used it for work as a developer for a few months before splitting off my windows work to a windows machine.

My experience with windows on my M1 MBP with parallels has not been great.

Run windows on mac m1