Apple will kill off Boot Camp with new ARM-based Macs

Within the 100 billion galaxies estimated to populate the known universe, there are few stranger sights someone running Windows natively on a MacBook. But such rare specimens may soon go the way as the dodo: In a Daring Fireball podcast, Apple revealed it does not plan to support Boot Camp on its upcoming ARM-based Macs.

In the podcast, Apple exec Craig Federighi said “purely virtualization is the route, but these hypervisors can be very efficient, so the need to direct boot shouldn’t really be the concern.” In other words, you’ll be able to run some operating systems with software like Parallels, but you won’t be able to run them natively upon boot. As far as we can tell, Boot Camp will be no more.

That should be fine for free operating systems that already support ARM processors, like various Linux variants, but Microsoft doesn’t currently sell its ARM version of Windows 10 to the public. When asked by The Verge about future plans for selling the ARM version of Windows, Microsoft say “we have nothing further to share at this time.” Moreover, existing virtualization apps will have to be rebuilt for the new hardware, though Apple did already show off Parallels running Linux in a virtual machine.

Considering both Microsoft and Apple are making long-term bets on ARM, it wouldn’t surprise me if Windows app support eventually made it on over to the Mac, but it doesn’t appear that will happen any time soon. Luckily, we live in an age where much of the work we do lives in browsers and the cloud, and most major apps have support for both operating systems. But if you regularly have to run Windows on your Mac for work or otherwise, you’ll want to think twice before ponying up the dough for ARM-based Apple silicon.

Via The Verge