M2 iPad Air Runs Windows 11 ARM via Emulation, Thanks to EU Rules

brailsafe · 2025-04-23T04:03:04 1745380984

It's crazy that Apple Microsofted itself so badly we've come full circle and had to force them to let us improve their product by installing Windows.

NoPicklez · 2025-04-23T04:51:46 1745383906

Well... I mean in 2009 I remember being able to run Windows on my Mac completed separate from MacOS through bootcamp. They marketed it as the best Windows PC, was on a Mac.

They weren't forced to do that but chose to

gblargg · 2025-04-23T04:07:43 1745381263

> emulates Windows 11 inside iPadOS by translating Windows code into ARM instructions

Do they mean x86 instructions, or Windows system calls? Regardless, there is a Windows 11 ARM64 build so I wonder why they aren't using this.

volemo · 2025-04-23T04:47:04 1745383624

> Regardless, there is a Windows 11 ARM64 build so I wonder why they aren't using this.

Because iPadOS doesn’t support virtualisation, so they have to emulate something.

walterbell · 2025-04-23T04:31:11 1745382671

First sentence of the article:

  Windows 11 ARM running on an M2 iPad Air using emulation

volemo · 2025-04-23T04:50:22 1745383822

I wonder why they decided to run the ARM version of Windows though. If one emulates, does it really matter what platform to emulate? Isn’t Windows for x86 still quite a bit more useful (e.g. doesn’t have to run a second layer of emulation to run x86 apps)?

gblargg · 2025-04-23T04:46:12 1745383572

And it talks about "translating Windows code into ARM", and using a just-in-time compiler. It sounds like perhaps it's "compiling" ARM into ARM, because the original ARM can't be run due to Apple's restrictions.