Free Way to Run Windows on Apple Silicon Mac
Apple Silicon Macs don’t support Boot Camp, meaning you can’t install and boot Windows directly. However, this does not mean that you cannot install and run Windows 11 on your Mac. Microsoft officially recommends two expensive options to do this: pay for the Windows 365 online service to run Windows remotely, and pay for Parallels Desktop to run it virtually. However, there is another option, and it doesn’t cost anything.
Run Windows on Mac without a subscription
UTM is an advanced open source Mac application based on QEMU, an open source emulator . With it, you can create a virtual machine running Windows on your Mac—meaning the entire operating system runs in a window next to macOS. There is native virtualization support for a version of Windows designed to run on Arm processors, which are fast; If you want lower performance, you can also emulate the x86 version, which is compatible with more Windows software.
Note that this isn’t an ideal setup for gaming on Windows—there’s no support for GPU emulation ( check out the Game Porting Toolkit instead if that’s what you’re looking for). If you just need access to a few specific Windows applications or to test software on Windows, UTM has you covered.
How to run Windows on Mac via UTM
The process of installing and running Windows on your Mac is not too complicated. To get started, download UTM – it’s free to download on Github, or you can pay $9.99 for the Mac App Store version. Next, you’ll need a copy of Windows 11, which you can download from Microsoft’s website – here’s the Arm version, and here’s the x86 version . If you find it too annoying to work with Microsoft’s download tools, the UTM developers recommend using Crystalfetch , a free Mac application that downloads ISO files from Microsoft. Note that Windows itself is not free – you will need to purchase a license to legally download and install the operating system.
Now that you have the Windows ISO, launch UTM and click the “+” button to create a new virtual machine. You will be asked if you want to virtualize or emulate the operating system. If you want to run the Arm version of Windows, select Virtualize. If you want to run the x86 version, click “Emulate”. Next you will be asked which operating system you want to install.
Click Windows . On the next screen, you will need to point the application to the previously downloaded ISO file.
You will then be asked how much memory and storage you want to allocate to the virtual machine. I recommend sticking with the default options unless you know exactly what you want. You will also be asked to select a shared folder; this is a folder on your Mac that your virtual machine will be able to access – you can share your entire home folder if you want to access all your files, or just a specific folder.
Finally, after all this, you can start the virtual machine for the first time. The Windows Installer will eventually download – follow all the prompts exactly as you did when setting up your Windows computer.
Once you’re done, you’ll see the Windows desktop, albeit with a tiny display and no Internet access.
You’re not quite done yet: it’s time to configure the drivers. Open File Explorer and the virtual CD should be mounted there. Run the executable there to configure the guest tools.
Your virtual machine will install the drivers and reboot. The virtual machine’s resolution will then scale as the window size changes. You will also be able to access the Internet and the shared folder from Windows. Congratulations: you now have a working version of Windows on your Mac.