Mac Studio - Installing Windows on a external drive

AnushkaMA wrote:

Hi,

I have an iMac 27" (late 2017) that I need to upgrade soon for working purposes. I am interested in a Mac Studio but I have read that the new silicon-based M chips prevent from running Windows on the new Macs.

You can't run Intel versions of Windows on Apple Silicon Macs. The Apple Silicon processors have a different type of machine code (based on the ARM instruction set) than Intel/AMD ones.

There is an ARM version of Windows. It can run some Windows/Intel applications – with limits – using emulation or translation. But you can only run it inside of a virtual machine (like Parallels Desktop or VMware Fusion). You can't install it standalone and boot from it as the host OS – as neither Microsoft or Apple support that for now.

Would it be possible to run Windows on an external drive connected to a Mac Studio (as I have been doing for the past 3 years with my iMac)?

Not in the way you're thinking. From the rest of your post, I take it that you were booting some regular Intel version of Windows, as a host OS, from an external drive. That's not going to work with an Apple Silicon Mac.

I have had apple computers since I started working 20 years ago and though OSX is my OS of choice, I loved how smooth Macs run Windows when you need to. Now Apple, due to his new chips, is almost forcing me to choose one OS or the other, since there are many Windows apps VWware, Parallels, etc... can't run.

Thanks in advance for any information.

Parallels works fine on my M1 Ultra. I'm not sure if everything runs under Parallels, but everything I use does--my Parallels runs Arm64, x86, and x64 processes according to Task Manager.