Unfortunately, with the transition to Apple Silicon and its ARM-based instruction set, the question of actually running Windows directly on a new M1-based MacBook or Mac mini is suddenly a lot more complicated. It also didn’t take long for virtualization companies to get on board, and both Parallels and VMware soon had their own Mac apps out that would let you run the Windows operating system itself natively under the Mac OS, without the need to carve out a separate partition or dual-boot into the other operating system.
In fact, Apple even helped this process along, offering up its own “Boot Camp” utility that would let Mac users partition off a chunk of their hard drive to set up a dual boot configuration where they could alternate between macOS (still known as “OS X” back in those days) and whatever flavour of Windows they felt like running.
