VMWare Fusion for M1 Mac has not officially been announced, but we have found out via Twitter that it is currently a work-in-progress and we can expect updates soon. VMWare Fusion is one of the two most popular virtualization apps for Macs and is commonly used to run Windows or Linux. The other app, Parallels, was recently released with support for M1 Macs and runs Windows 10 on ARM without breaking a sweat.
VMWare Fusion for M1 Mac progress update should be out soon
Somehow, VMWare has been awfully quiet despite M1 Macs being available for many months now. Many users have been inquiring about the update from the VMWare Fusion account but have been getting a standard response that Fusion is Intel only at the moment and they don’t have any timeline to share for M1 support, which is something they are working on. Fortunately, Michael Roy, product manager at VMWare, responded on Twitter to a tweet, saying that a progress update is coming soon, likely as early as this week.
Progress update coming soon… Next week probably :)
The @VMwareFusion account is well monitored but Legal has issues with us talking about future stuffs… So we've been largely quiet about it, but we're working through that.
— Michael Roy (@mikeroySoft) April 15, 2021
Michael’s reason for not talking about “future stuff” was to do with legalities. Windows for ARM is not officially available for customers to purchase, and users might be violating EULA by using it, which is why VMWare has not announced a press release. This does not make a lot of sense to us as we all know that Windows 10 for ARM is available as an Insider build that anyone can download and use, without breaking any terms. This is why Parallels has already gone ahead and released its update that supports Apple Silicon, and the performance results are amazing. Windows 10 for ARM runs faster in Parallels on M1 Mac, than it does natively on Surface Pro X.
Despite no official announcement, Michael shared a hint of what to expect in terms of performance from VMWare Fusion from M1 Mac. He has been running 5 virtual machines, each with 4 cores and 8GB of RAM, without his M1 MacBook Air (8 cores, 16GB memory) breaking a sweet.
That said… my test MBA (8c, 16GB) is currently running 5 VMs, each with 4 cores and 8GB of RAM and not breaking a sweat… I'm VERY pleased with things…
— Michael Roy (@mikeroySoft) April 15, 2021
VMWare Fusion is a popular solution for virtualizing operating systems on Macs. It is used for graphics-intensive applications and gaming needs, supports eGPUs, runs containers and Kubernetes clusters, connects to ESXi or Center Servers, and supports macOS Big Sur.
As M1 Macs do not support Bootcamp, there is a lot of demand for virtualization software, and VMWare should really jump on the opportunity. The company has an amazing app for Intel Macs, and users would love to use the same features on faster M1 Macs.
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