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Comment by elforce002 | Hacker News Reader

Why would I do that? This is an honest question. I recently bought a Mac Mini coming from MSFT and I don't miss windows at all. I don't have to fight with it anymore when programming and testing things.

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There are plenty of apps or features that remain Windows exclusive. In Microsoft's office suite, things like PowerBI only offer Windows desktop apps. And even within apps like Powerpoint there are features that don't exist in the Mac version (like grids). There are certainly equivalent or better alternatives to both of these examples available on Mac, but if your company uses these products Parallels could be a better alternative to having a second PC.

I haven't really loved Mac OS in a while, so I could see you could want the very nice Mac hardware but a different operating system. I never really did Windows-on-Mac much, besides some very occasional Boot Camp usage, but I did run Linux on a couple different Mac laptops for several years.

I don't think it really makes much sense now though... no particularly good reason not to just get a Dell XPS or something in that ballpark for your Linux or Windows needs and avoid the hassle.

The sheer absurdity of running Linux tools on WSL inside Parallels inside a Mac host might be worth something, too. (Or actually, can you even do that, with two levels of virtualization? I seem to remember this is an issue, maybe specifically on the new ARM chips.)

My dentist has some proprietary software to administer her practice (I don't think it does everything - maybe keeps X ray images, and some other stuff.) It's Windows only and she runs it in a Windows XP virtual machine of some kind. But all the computers in the office are Macs. She upgraded to the M1 iMacs but the old Windows software doesn't work in there. So she kept an old Intel Mac in a corner somewhere to run the software.

If she could run that in Arm Windows in a window on a Mac I'm sure she would.

She's a dentist, not an IT professional. Windows apps run on Apple Silicon, even if she does not know how.

What in the world are you talking about

Emulating Windows XP on Apple silicon Macs should be plenty fast for that purpose.

I have moved all my development to my Mac (C#, Sql Server) except I need Visual Studio for .Net Framework, SSIS and SSRS projects. Visual Studio for Windows ARM recently came out but doesn't work with most extensions, so I still use VS 2019.

Testing cross platform developed apps would be an other reason

some software is windows only, especially most games (if not by number, then by feeling if you're in the pc gaming world).

It’s not for you, it’s a way for Microsoft employees and Windows fanboys finally being officially able to buy good hardware and run Windows on it. I can’t imagine how awful it must be for all those Windows bros to see everyone else work on amazing M2 hardware whilst they are trodding behind on the shit show that the entire Surface brand is.

Except that you won't run on the amazing M2 hardware but in a VM which is slower than running on real hardware.

It depends on the "real hardware". A MacBook Air runs Windows 11 faster than a Dell XPS Plus.

https://www.cultofmac.com/788405/m2-macbook-air-runs-windows...

Which is interesting since since the 1280p seems to be faster than the M2 according to most benchmarks.

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