Macbook Air M1 Virtualbox



You unfortunately cannot run VirtualBox on Macs with Apple’s M1 chip. If this will change in the future is currently unknown but it doesn’t appear very likely as the Oracle has not said anything about it whereas others like VMWare Fusion and Parallels have both had support pledged for them.

  1. Virtualbox M1 Mac
  • The new M1 MacBook Air: 16GB RAM, 1TB SSD. The 2018 MacBook Pro 13-inch: Quad-core i7, 16GB RAM, 512GB SSD. To be honest, the 2018 MBP has served me pretty well for the past 2 years. It can still handle my work flow smoothly, especially it can run Vagrant/VirtualBox and Docker right now, which are essential for the testing of my codes.
  • It doesn't yet support M1 Macs - unlike Parallels and VMware, Oracle has made no commitment as yet to getting the software running on an M1 Mac. VirtualBox still throws a lot of jargon at you.
MacbookMacbook pro m1 virtualboxWith Apple moving to ARM based CPUs with their M1 based Macs, I am curious as to whether this end of the road for Virtual Box on macOS? I ask since Virtual Box does state on its home page that 'VirtualBox is a powerful x86 and AMD64/Intel64 virtualization product for enterprise as well as home use.'

Virtualbox M1 Mac

My understanding is that Virtual Box would need to depend on emulation to work on ARM, so it is no longer really virtualisation. If there has been any decisions made by the Virtual Box team, that can be shared, then I'd be curious to to know, partly so I can make an impact analysis when looking at new hardware.



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