If you have Before you do anything else, make sure your Mac is updated to the latest version of OS X your computer supports, and verify it has 8GB or more of RAM. You should download the ARM Preview version, and probably not continue with this tutorial as it’s written for Windows 10 for Intel chips using VirtualBox. Note, if you have an M1 Mac, you need a special version of Windows that runs on ARM processors! Here’s a link to a tutorial for how install Windows 10 using Parallels on a M1 Mac.

This tutorial was written for VirtualBox, since it’s free and you don’t have to reboot your computer to access Windows (this is why I don’t recommend Bootcamp, since you lose access to your Mac files and software). If the topic of virtualization interests you, check out some more of our posts on the subject.If you’re a Mac user, there’s no need to sell your Mac and get a Windows computer. You can use VirtualBox, Parallels or VMWare (links lead to academic versions) to run Windows on your Mac. There are many other options available for virtualization, including the free UTM app which allows you to easily run Windows 11 on an Apple Silicon Mac for example, but there’s also paid solutions including VMWare and Parallels.

Go to to find the appropriate download, listed as “Developer preview for macOS / Arm64 (M1/M2) hosts”.As usual, VirtualBox is completely free to download and to use. While technically in beta, anyone can get access to the developer preview beta ARM build of VirtualBox through the VirtualBox website. It does this by virtualizing hardware (that you can adjust to allocate RAM, storage capacity, etc), so the operating system itself doesn’t know that it’s not running on actual hardware. VirtualBox is virtualization software that allows you to run other operating systems in containers on your Mac directly from the application, for example you can run Linux or Windows directly within VirtualBox, and without having to use dual-booting or anything else.

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