by jchw | 2025-08-11 06:24:40+00:00
I can't tell you how much I disagree with this take.

Microsoft's AMD64 emulator is slow and buggy compared to Rosetta, and you will need it a lot more, too. Many apps will need to rely on this, including programs many users will immediately try to use, like Visual Studio. Neither Visual Studio nor its compilers support running on an ARM host; it does seem to basically work, but is slow, which is not good considering Visual Studio is already not particularly fast. It will even display a message box warning you that it is not supported during setup, so you couldn't miss it (note that this applies to the Visual Studio compilers needed by Python and Node for installing packages with C extensions). MSys2 gave me a lot of trouble, too; the setup just doesn't seem to work on ARM64. Chocolatey often installs AMD64 or x86 binaries on ARM instead of native ones; sometimes native ones don't exist anyways. Third party thing that needs to load a kernel module? Don't bet on there being an ARM64 build of it; sometimes there is, sometimes there isn't. WinFSP has a build, many hardware drivers I've looked at don't seem to (don't laugh: you can pass through USB devices, there is sense in installing actual hardware drivers.) I just set up a fresh copy of Parallels on an M3 Mac a couple months ago, I'm stopping now to be terse, this paragraph could easily be much longer. It would suffice to say that basic Windows software usage is a lot worse on Parallels than a native Windows AMD64 machine. Very useful, sure. At parity, oh no. Not close.

That's just the basics though. For GPU, Parallels does do some D3D11 translation which is (a lot!) better than nothing, but you are not getting native performance, you are not getting Vulkan support, and you are certainly not getting ROCm or CUDA or anything equivalent, so actually a lot of apps that practically need GPU acceleration are not going to be usable anyways. Even if a video game would run, anti-piracy and anti-cheat measures in lots of modern games detect and block users using VM software, not that you can expect that all of the games you want to run would even work anyways on ARM; plenty of games are known to be unstable and some don't work at all. There are other side effects of trying to do actual gaming in VMs in general, but I really think this gets the point across: Windows games and multimedia are significantly worse in Parallels than on a native machine.

Parallels filesystem bridging is impractical, it's not fast enough and it is buggy, i.e. running Bazel on bridged files will not work. This means you need to copy stuff back and forth basically all the time if you want to work on stuff natively but then test on Windows. Maybe this is partly Window's fault, but in any case it would suffice to say that workflows that involve Windows will be a lot clunkier than they would be on a native Windows machine.

I think these conclusions, that a native Windows machine would be a lot better for doing Windows things than a Mac running Parallels, is actually pretty obvious and self-evident, but reading what you said might literally give someone the opposite impression, that there is little reason to possibly want to run Windows. This is just misleading. Parallels is a great option as a last resort or to fill a gap, but if you have anything that regularly requires you to use Windows software or test on Windows, Parallels is not a very serious option. It may be cheaper than two machines in fiat currency, but probably not in sanity.

I don't know you, so I can't and won't, based on a single post, accuse you of being a fanboy. However, this genre of retort is a serious issue with fanboyism. It's easy to say "Windows? just use VMs!", but that's because for some people, actually just using Windows is probably not a serious option they would consider anyways; if the VM didn't work for a use case they'd back up and reconsider almost anything else before they reconsider their choice of OS or hardware vendor, but they probably barely need (if at all) a VM with Windows anyways. If this feels like a personal attack, I'd like to clarify that I am describing myself. I will not use Windows. I don't have a bare metal Windows machine in my house, and I do my best to limit Windows usage in VMs, too. Hell, I will basically only use macOS under duress these days, I'm not a fan of the direction it has gone either.

Still, I do not go around telling people that they should just go switch to Linux if they don't like Windows, and that Virtualbox or Wine will solve all of their problems, because that's probably not true and it's downright dishonest when deep down I know how well the experience will go. The honest and respectful thing to tell people about Linux is that it will suck, some of the random hardware you use might not work, some of your software won't work well under Wine or VMs, and you might spend more time troubleshooting. If they're still interested even after proper cautioning, chances are they'll actually go through with it and figure it out: people do not need to be sold a romantic vision, if anything they need the opposite, because they may struggle to foresee what kinds of problems they might run into. Telling people that virtual machines are a magic solution and you don't have to care about software compatibility is insane, and I say that with full awareness that Parallels is better than many of the other options in terms of user friendliness and out of the box capabilities.

I think the same thing is fair to do for macOS. With macOS there is the advantage that the entire experience is nicer as long as everything you want to do fits nicely into Apple's opinionated playbook and you buy into Apple's ecosystem, but I rarely hear people actually mention those latter caveats. I rarely hear people mention that, oh yeah, a lot of cool features I use only work because i use Apple hardware and services throughout my entire life, and your Android phone might not work as well, especially not with those expensive headphones I think you should get for your Mac. Fanboys of things have a dastardly way of only showing people the compelling side of things and leaving out the caveats. I don't appreciate this, and I think it ultimately has an overtone of thinking you know what someone wants better than they do. If someone is really going to be interested in living the Mac life, they don't need to be mislead to be compelled.