- If you've seen one of my most recent videos,
you would know that Parallels
has just updated their software
to be able to support Windows on the M1 Macs.
And I'm pleased to report that it works totally fine.
So in this video, I'm going to to show you exactly
how to set it up and how to get it working on your own Mac.
As you can see here, I have a base model, 2020 Mac Mini.
But I have got this to work on my Pro and also my Air.
So it doesn't really matter which model you're using.
Anyway, let's go into the screen
and I'll show you how it's done.
Okay. So first things first,
you want to open up your web browser
and you want to go onto Parallels.com
and you want to actually sign in and make an account.
Now, if you've already bought Parallels for Mac,
this is probably going to be supported already.
If not use the link down below to sign up for an account
and also purchase Parallels for Mac.
That is an affiliate link by the way.
Now, once you've purchased Parallels,
you just want to put these keywords into Google,
just search it and it'll bring up this page.
And you'll see the
"Welcome to the Parallels Desktop 16
for M1 Mac Technical Preview."
So you want to scroll a little bit further down here
until you see step number three, Install and Activate.
And you can see the actual version number here
for the M1 Mac.
So we're going to want to download that.
And we're going to click Allow.
Okay, so we're going to double click on this to install,
Open, and we're going to click Accept.
You're going to put in your user password.
Now you're obviously going to have to give Parallels
some permissions, so just click allow and yes
and agree to all these.
So once The install is finished,
you're going to get this information screen
from the installation assistant.
And it basically says that
your Mac is running on ARM architecture.
So it means you can only really run Parallels
with an ARM OS as well.
So what that means is you can't use
an x86 version of Windows.
You need to have the ARM based one.
So as it says here,
"To create a virtual machine you need a VHDX or ISO image
with an ARM-based operating system."
And this is important again
because this is the only one that's going to work
with this particular version of Parallels.
So what we'll need to do is we'll actually need
to download an ARM-based version of Windows.
So if we come back to your web browser
and what you want to do is you want to go
to this website here, which I'll link in the description.
And this is going to be the Windows Insider Preview
specifically the ARM Insider Preview.
Now you will need to log into this
and also sign up to be a Windows Insider.
It is free, and this particular download is free as well.
And then what you want to do is you want to download
the Windows 10 Client ARM 64 Insider Preview.
Okay, so once you finish that,
it's going to be about eight and a half gigabytes in size
and you can see it here in my Downloads folder.
We're going to hit Continue.
And it's actually going to automatically find
that .VHDX file that we've just downloaded.
And we're going to hit Create.
And what this is going to do is it's actually going
to build the virtual machine, install Windows,
and also set up Windows on the VM.
Now, if you haven't already signed in
this is going to prompt you to do it.
So I'm just going to do that now and skip forward.
Now, the next thing you're going to have to do
is you're going to have to actually activate
your version of Parallels.
So come back to the original Parallels website
where you actually downloaded the original program
and you'll see just underneath that and activation key.
So you want to copy that and you want to paste it in here
and then you want to click Activate
and that's essentially going
to activate your version of Parallels.
And you can see that it's been activated successfully.
And now it's going to continue configuring the virtual machine.
Okay, now after a few more minutes
you're going to actually get to the desktop here.
And you can see it is usable pretty much straightaway.
So let's just make this a little bit bigger here.
And you can see it's already installed
the drivers and everything for the mouse and the keyboard.
So if we come down here, click on that works totally fine.
We'll go on to Edge and actually download Steam
'cause I'm going to be doing some gaming tests
a little bit later on.
You can see here works totally fine.
I install Steam, run.
And that is now going to install.
And as you can see, you can actually come up here
and you can make it full screen.
So this is going to look just as good
as it would on a native Windows computer.
So there's absolutely no issues at all here
and see very quick, very smooth, very snappy.
So if we exit full screen again
and you can actually see if I press Command on the keyboard
hold down Command and then press Tab.
I can literally switch
between Windows and Mac just like that.
So it's pretty impressive.
And if we're not using it anymore
we can come up here and we can actually pause it,
and that's just going to suspend it
or we can actually shut it down or stop it
but it's always better to shut it down from inside the VM.
So if we unpause this,
and we come here and we just go Shut down
that is just going to shut down the VM, save everything,
and you'll be good to go for the next time you open it up.
And what we'll also do is we'll go into Activity Monitor
and I'll give you guys an idea of
how much RAM and CPU it's taking up
just by sitting here idle.
So obviously there's nothing going on inside this VM.
It's just sitting there.
So at the moment, it is using only about 5% of the CPU.
Well, obviously it's going to fluctuate so.
So you can see that it's really not
using much of the CPU at all.
It's still 80% of the CPU idle.
And if we come into the Memory tab
it is using a lot of memory.
That's using over six gigabytes of RAM.
You can see here, this Swap memory
is actually very, very low.
On my laptop, I saw this get up to about 1.6 gigabytes
and they're both eight gigabyte RAM models.
So this Mac Mini and all my other Macs, all eight gig RAM
and I haven't really had any issues yet.
But if you are going to be doing a fair bit
of VMs and virtualization, I definitely do recommend
trying to get 16 gigabyte version If you can.
As you can see here,
just literally sitting on the desktop, if we unpause this.
Just sitting on the desktop is using 6.2 gigabytes of RAM
and that's completely maxing out the RAM on this machine.
So I definitely do think at this stage.
getting the 16 gigabyte RAM option
if you plan to do any kind
of VMs at all is definitely a good investment.
Anyway guys, that's it for this video.
Hopefully this how to video was helpful and you enjoyed it.
And if there's any issues
let me know in the comment section below.
But apart from that, I'll catch you guys in the next one.