If you’ve ever had a burning desire to run Windows on an iPhone or iPad, UTM does the job.
UTM also works on “the other Apple Silicon”, with versions of both iOS and iPadOS. It’s free to download or $9.99 on the Mac App Store. That’s why I was happy to see that there is a VM environment that works on M1 Macs – UTM. VMWare has pledged an Apple Silicon version of Fusion, but it won’t support Windows virtual machines! There’s still no word on whether the free VirtualBox VM environment will ever be updated to run on Apple Silicon.
UPDATE (July 9, 2021): Parallels Desktop now runs on Apple Silicon, a solution that was not available in March of 2021 when this article was first published. UTM (which I believe stands for Universal Turing Machine) is an open source virtual machine environment.
While you might be spending most of your time in macOS 11 Big Sur, your job might require you to use Windows-only apps, Perhaps you need a Linux VM for development work.
Your shiny and speedy new Apple Silicon Mac is missing something – the ability to run virtual machines.
