setting up a windows vm on an M series Mac

This comment does not address your main problem directly, but I just wanted to point out that Apple's 3.5mm USB-c adapter is as standard as it gets and is pretty cheap as well, and if you don't have anything to plug into it, the USB-c EarPods include everything and are also pretty cheap. Anyone seriously interested in installing Windows on any computer should have at least a USB-c analog audio dongle, because unfortunately the Windows installer is missing audio drivers in many situations, including for the standard VirtIO hardware that is being adopted by virtualization and emulation software, and has been supported on macOS and Linux for quite some time.

Hi,

The best accessible solution to use is vmware fusion. it works very well with voiceover, and you can install windows 11.

Agree with everything said so far. I use both a dongle and fusion. I use ugreen's personally. Very solid. AS a complete side note, the lightning :( to jack adapter from ugreen is way better than the one sold by apple which is very very easy to break.
Question for devs out there, I saw references on apple developer to what seems to be a programatic way to get a vm running, is it only for specific use cases?

Question for devs out there, I saw references on apple developer to what seems to be a programatic way to get a vm running, is it only for specific use cases?

I don't know what you found specifically, but Apple's Hypervisor and Virtualization frameworks can be used to host virtual machines on macOS without requiring kernel privileges. The hypervisor framework is pretty low level, requiring a lot of work to actually built something useful, but the Virtualization framework that's built on top of it stops pretty short of being a fully blown virtual machine hosting application, because the only thing it's missing is a user interface. This means that anyone with minimal knowledge can actually leverage it to build fully functional virtual machine software complete with Rosetta-powered x86 translation for guest applications on ARM-based Macs very easily. I myself could do this in a week, and the only reason I haven't is because UTM already offers all the functionality of the Virtualization framework with an actual user interface, but there's no shortage of low effort virtualization spam on the Mac App Store if you search for it.

I'm not even exaggerating here. The Virtualization framework even includes an NSView subclass to draw its content on, so all you have to do to use it in SwiftUI is literally wrap it in a type conforming to the NSViewRepresentable protocol, configure the view to your liking, and display the resulting view in your SwiftUI interface, which you must also design to allow users to actually configure their virtual machines. The only downside of this framework is that, practically speaking, it only supports VirtIO drivers, but for macOS and Linux you don't really need anything else.

I don't remember having to use a dongle when setting up a vm on my m1 macbook air. The VM experience with only 8 gb ram left a lot to be desired, but with an m4 and 16 gb, you can dedicate 8 of that to the vm and that should work fantastically!
It is entirely possible I had to have sighted help getting the VM up and running, but I honestly don't remember. It was over a year ago and I've had more important things to think about since then. lol VMWare does work quite well, and the VM itself, once you have Windows up and going will be just fine.

I setup Windows 11 using VMWare Fusion. If I can remember right, there is no audio initially, but once you get a couple of pages in the startup wizard, then it is possible to enable Narrator and then everything is fine. In my case, I just got sighted assistance until it started speaking. I presume that's what the dongle is for.

My main issues other than that were getting the caps lock or insert keys mapped. There is another post on Applevis with some Apple scripts to help with this but I've not got around to trying them out yet.

Has anyone gotten UTM to work on m1 mac? Whether I use windows 11 or 10, I get some strange messages that I cannot get passed even using VOCR.

I also have this same issue with vmware. Is there a way around this?

Where did you get the .iso from? I never had this problem with utm or vmware.

Hold down enter immediately after booting the VM. This should boot the installer properly.

If there's enough interest, I can create a VM with Windows installed at the setup screen. You'd have to configure it yourself and install any additional software like VMWare Tools. Should I make a VM for UTM, Fusion, or both?

It sounds like people here would benefit from both. Just basing this on past posts and replies, etc. 🙂

Hi all,

Just a quick note that due to potential intellectual property/copyright concerns, distribution/sharing of VM's (or any other type of software) is not something that could be discussed on AppleVis.

Thanks,
Michael

That's completely understandable. My intent was simply to make it easier to get up and running. If people are interested, feel free to reach out to me privately so we don't get the website into potential trouble. The same offer extends if you have issues downloading Fusion itself. They make it far too difficult to download a free product.

Thanks so much Chris, what is the best way to reach you?

Hey there, creating a windows VM would not violate any license terms, as long as you don't activate windows. Anyone can download windows eleven, and its the person's responsibility to activate it. Also, VMWare fusion no longer has a license key or a need for one, so distributing the download wouldn't be against terms either. Hope that helps.

I agree with the last person, but in the interest of not cluttering this thread anymore, feel free to reach out privately. The contact page on my profile should send an email, and then we can go from there. I don't plan to put any data in the VM other than a fresh install of Windows 11 downloaded directly from Microsoft at the setup screen. Audio should work by default because I've already done the first portion of the installation. You'd have to go through the standard out of box experience with Narrator. The only things you'd potentially need to customize are region and time settings afterwords. I also plan on creating a default snapshot with Fusion. If you ever wanted to restore the system back to the initial state, you could easily do so. I don't personally see the harm in it, but if it isn't allowed to be discussed or linked to on the website, that's perfectly fine.

On another note on the same topic, has anyone noticed a lag in UTM that isn't in fusion? Which program do you like better for virtualization since they are both free now? Pros and cons to both?

I use fusion exactly for that reason. In fact even before the acquisition it was free you just still had to put random values when creating the account and it'd create a license key for free.

Thanks again Chris for being willing to create a VM in fusion, I sent you an email on the contact page.

Nikos, I've responded to your message.
I haven't really tried UTM yet. I wonder if the latency is due to audio latency, not performance issues? Try connecting a USB sound device directly to the VM. Maybe it's also an issue with QEMU itself? Are you emulating another architecture like X86?

Nope, it still lags when an audio device is directly connected to the VM. It might just be the nature of UTM. I've never emulated x86 because of how slow that is by default.

I saw a comment above asking where you can get the windows for ARM ISO. Fusion and UTM both have ways to download it. For Fusion, when creating a new VM, it gives you the option to download windows directly from Microsoft. In UTM, it links you to an app in the mac app store you can use to download windows from Microsoft. I've used it, and it is accessible. If I remember the name, I think it is called Crystal Fetch. I'm not on the mac right now, so I'm going off memory.

You can also download a Windows 11 ISO directly from Microsoft's Windows for ARM download page.

Can you finally download windows 11 for arm from microsoft now? I remember for the longest time it was only via third-party services you could download the iso.

Yeah, this option was introduced in November of last year.