- So I made a video previously
on this state of Parallels and the M1 Macs.
And as of about three weeks ago, it just didn't work at all
and it obviously wasn't compatible.
About 12 hours ago, I got an email from Parallels
saying that they have just released their beta version
that is compatible with the new M1 Macs.
And I decided to download it straight away, test it,
and make a short video showing you guys my findings.
So without further ado, let's jump into
my base model M1 MacBook Pro and let's take a look.
Okay, so before you're actually able
to use Parallels on the new M1 Macs,
you need to obviously download a few things.
Now we'll have a video on this showing you exactly
how to do it a little bit later on.
But for now the main thing you need is obviously Parallels.
So if you haven't purchased Parallels,
I'll have a link in the description.
It is an affiliate link.
So make sure you go on there and purchase Parallels first
if you don't already have it.
And then the second thing you need to do
is need to actually come out
to the Technical Preview for the M1 Mac.
Now this is the URL.
So it's my.parallels.com/desktop/beta.
And this will actually take you
to the page where you can download
the beta version of Parallels for the M1 Mac.
So if we scroll down this page
and obviously make sure you're logged in,
you can see here, Step 3: Install and Activate.
So just want to click that.
You want to download it.
You want to install the beta version of my Parallels.
And then what you want to do as well
is this particular version of Parallels on the M1 Mac,
as you can see here it is not possible
to install or start and Intel x86 based operating system
in this virtual machine.
So what are you going to need is a Windows ARM .ISO
to actually use Parallels.
So now if you come to this particular website here,
you will have to create a Microsoft account
and you will have to sign up as a Insider Preview.
And that's going to actually allow you to download
the Windows 10 ARM Insider Preview,
which is the most up-to-date ARM version of Windows.
And this is what's going to let you
actually use Parallels on your Mac.
So again, I'll have a full tutorial and walkthrough video
showing you this a little bit later.
But for now, as you can see here,
I now have Parallels installed.
So if we actually open it up.
And we click on Windows 10.
And as you can see that Windows 10 is loading up
perfectly fine without any issues.
You can see I've actually got some apps installed already.
So I've got Steam have a couple
of benchmarking apps as well.
But I've been playing around with this for a little while
and there's absolutely no issues.
So I can come in here.
I can actually pause it if I want.
And there's zero issues.
I can restart the VM, absolutely fine.
Installing x86 programs like Steam, totally fine.
I will be testing out some gaming shortly.
But what we might do first is we might just do
a quick little benchmark test
and we'll see what we're getting.
So we'll go on to Geekbench 5.
And we're going run this CPU benchmark
Now, while we're actually running this benchmark,
let's bring up the Activity Monitor.
And we'll have a look at what the CPU
and the RAM utilization is like.
So as you can see here, it's barely using any CPU.
Again, remember this is doing a benchmark test
at the moment, it's only using,
well it does fluctuate obviously
'cause it's benchmarking right now.
But you can still see we've got a quite a bit of idle there,
but I think the most important thing to look at
is actually the memory usage.
So you can see here the Windows 10 virtual machine
is using almost six gigabytes of RAM.
So that's pretty much everything
that is currently available on the Mac, it is maxing it out.
But it is good to see here
it's only using 1.6 gigabytes of swap memory.
So it's obviously running quite well.
Otherwise we would see a huge amount of swap usage here
but in just day-to-day use of Windows 10 on this VM,
no issues at all, it runs very, very smoothly.
So we'll minimize that and we'll go back
to the Geekbench test.
Okay, so we can see here, the Single-Core Score was 1439
and the Multi-Core score was 2,700.
But you guys have to understand
this is a beta version of Parallels,
running a beta version of the Windows ARM operating system.
So even for this to run out or get any kind of score
is pretty impressive.
Now, if we actually go and look at the comparisons.
So we're looking for about 2,700 on the multi-core score.
So if we scroll down here a little bit more.
We can see we're getting equivalent
to about a 2012 Mac Mini or a 27-inch late 2013 iMac.
So obviously not the most powerful thing ever
but it's still pretty decent for what it is.
Now, we'll be doing much more detailed benchmarks shortly.
I just thought I'd give you guys
just a really brief overview of Parallels.
And just obviously show you that it does work
and it does work fairly well.
Now, if we come down here to the Start button
and we click Power and we click Shut down,
you can see that the VM is going to shut down
very, very quickly without any issues at all
which is really interesting to me because previous versions
of Parallels would sometimes have issues.
But you can see there that's just shut down straightaway,
No issues.
We can quit the Parallels program itself,
no issues at all shuts straight down.
Anyway guys, that's it for this video.
Again, just a really brief one
just to show you the current state of Parallels
and running Windows in a VM on the M1 Macs.
As you can see, it's very, very early days
but it is very promising and I'm excited
to see what the next few months is going to hold.
Anyway guys, stay tuned on my channel
for more windows 10 and VM testing on the M1 Macs.
But apart from that, thank you guys for watching
and I'll catch you in the next one.