According to the company, the M1-enabled version of Parallels Desktop “has made tremendous progress” since WWDC. When Apple announced the move to its own silicon for Mac computers during the WWDC 2020 keynote this summer, it demonstrated a prototype version of Parallels Desktop running a Linux virtual machine smoothly on Apple Silicon development hardware. Good news: A new version of Parallels Desktop for Mac that can run on Macs with the M1 chip is already in active development. It’s important to note that current versions of Parallels Desktop cannot run virtual machines on Macs with the M1 chip. However, virtual machines are an exception. Fortunately, our Parallels Access, Parallels Toolbox and Parallels Client software worked smoothly even before Parallels rebuilt them as universal binaries. The transition to Macs with the Apple M1 chip should be smooth for most macOS apps thanks to Rosetta technology. Parallels is excited to see the performance, power efficiency and virtualization features that are brought to the Mac with Apple M1 chip. Parallels Desktop, a popular virtualization app for Mac systems with Intel chips, announced today that a new version of the app that can run on these new Mac computers equipped with the Apple M1 chip is in “active development.” And while Apple has only said that Boot Camp will not work with the new M1-powered Mac computers, companies that build virtualization software may provide a solution down the road. When Apple announced the switch away from Intel chips this summer, many people have been wondering about Boot Camp’s future.

M1 apple virtualization