VMware Fusion for M1 Macs is now available as a Private Tech Preview for a limited audience. A public tech preview will be made available in a few weeks. However, unlike Parallels for M1 Macs, VMware Fusion for Apple Silicon will not ship with official support for Windows 10 or Windows 11 for Arm. While users will be able to install these operating systems in the virtual environment, no VMware Tools supports will mean that users will not get a good experience.
VMware Fusion’s Apple Silicon support will not be as full-featured as Parallels
As per VMware, this is due to Microsoft’s licensing as Windows 10 or Windows 11 for Arm are not available commercially. Users mostly download a copy of either of these operating systems from Microsoft as an Insider Preview.
Compared to Parallels for Apple Silicon, VMware Fusion will also not support macOS 12 virtual machines which will make it far less capable than the former.
From the looks of things, the initial VMware Fusion for M1 release will also be missing other features like hardware 3D acceleration for Ubuntu VMs. Parallels has already received a few updates and performance improvements for operating systems like Windows 11 since its first release earlier this year.
The first M1 Macs were released in November 2020, and it has been almost 11 months and VMware has yet to release an update that supports Apple Silicon. There is no guidance on when the public release will be available and whether it will be a free upgrade for existing customers or if they would need to purchase a new license.
If you are interested in VMware Fusion Tech Preview, you can register your interest by filling out this form.
Read more:
- How to install Windows 11 in Parallels on an M1 Mac
- Run Windows 10 on ARM on M1 Macs with Parallels 16.5 with 30% faster performance and 250% less energy usage than Intel
- Here is how games perform in Windows 10 on Arm using Parallels on M1 Macs
- Windows in Parallels on M1 Mac runs faster than it does on Surface Pro X
