This enormous effort was necessary because Apple is kicking third-party kexts to the curb once and for all when macOS Big Sur arrives this fall. Moving forwardĪccording to the developer, Parallels Desktop 16 for Mac is the result of a “25-man-year effort” to ditch traditional virtualization kernel extensions (“kexts” in code-speak), the stuff which allows this software to efficiently run other operating systems in tandem with macOS in the first place. He Installation Assistant makes it a snap to install any supported operating system as a VM, including the macOS Big Sur public beta. In the meantime, they’ve released the latest annual upgrade to its flagship Mac software, which once again arrives with plenty of welcome improvements and-for the moment at least-one unfortunate limitation. This potential roadblock applies equally to virtual machines, and despite the virtualization experts at Parallels successfully demonstrating Linux running on ARM, the company remains tight-lipped about the fate of Windows.

The announcement of a transition to ARM-based Apple silicon over the next two years sent a chill down the spine of everyone running Windows via Boot Camp, since there’s no indication at this writing such a feature will remain feasible without Intel inside.

At this year’s WWDC, the Mac took a giant step closer to iOS in terms of hardware.