I humbly disagree. Sooner or later, MS will pull the pin on the Win11 developer thread and then one will not be able to get a licensed version to run on an M1 platform.
Whether that makes great sense or not, or whether it matches my personal desires, is beside the point. MS can do what they think is best for them and supporting Apple h/w might not be in their interests. For example, what a great way for MS to alienate all the manufacturers building on Intel platforms.
For their part, Apple just introduced two new variants of the M1 and I'm not certain how much advanced notice they gave MS of how those will work.
Time will tell but I'm not willing to stake my company's accounting platform on MS and Apple playing nice or that Intuit and Parallels can save my bacon.
My comment is not a suggestion to stay on the bleeding edge of technology with your production work, but rather that Microsoft doesn't choose hardware partners, they create OS solutions to fit a specified hardware architecture.
Since 1983 Microsoft has built its Windows OS to run on the CISC architecture of the Intel product family. Sometime in 2012 they built their first hardware platforms around an ARM processor (a RISC architecture that much faster than CISC), and created Windows RT. They have continued to develop Windows for ARM64 processors that come in current Surface computers (see this link --
https://techcommunity.microsoft.com...porting-windows-10-on-arm-in-the/ba-p/2118048).
By committing low-power Surface laptops to an ARM64 architecture, Microsoft is committing to updating and maintaining Windows 11 on ARM64. Surface laptops on ARM64 CPUs get much faster performance, generate much less heat, and have better battery life. Note that Microsoft DOES NOT create their own processors. Currently they use the AMD Ryzen CPU chip, which is another ARM architecture licensed from ARM Holdings.
Also, please note that Microsoft never has supported MacBooks in the past. They simply supported the architecture of the Intel chips, whether they were produced by Intel, or AMD, or someone else, and regardless of which PC manufacturer built a product around those chips. They didn't "partner" with Intel or AMD - they simply made the Windows OS work on that CPU architecture.
In fact it was Apple that supported Microsoft by creating the Bootcamp capability in MacOS to install and run Microsoft Windows in a disk partition, so all this talk of whether Microsoft will support the M1 chip is really ironic - they never have supported the Apple MacBook family, it was Apple supporting Microsoft. Parallels created their Parallels Desktop product to allow Mac users to run Windows apps within MacOS without the need for Bootcamp, which is much more flexible. There are no "hooks" in Windows for running in MacOS - all of the magic is handled by Parallels.
Any company that designs and fabricates a chip that supports the ARM architecture can run Windows ARM64. Apple's M1 CPUs support the ARM architecture, and I expect Parallels to support the Virtual Machine software layer running on the M1 chips "officially" soon, otherwise they are out of business.
On another point - have you read about the performance of the new Apple M1 Pro and M1 Max laptops? My feeling is that we are at a transition point in personal computing where all chipmakers are going to have to pivot to the ARM architecture. They simply can't afford to create CISC CPUs that are slower, hotter, and have battery life that much less than an ARM chip. Can you imagine trying to run a smartphone OS on an Intel CPU? Every smartphone, and every tablet computer is running on a CPU that is compliant with the ARM64 architecture.
My guess is that in 5 years the competition between the RISC and CISC architectures will be over, and nearly all PCs will run on ARM. Microsoft wants to remain in the OS business whether their Surface laptops continue to be offered or not, so my guess is that the future of the Windows ARM64 is secure.
