Even Windows 10 and 11 Preview boot times are snappy, certainly faster than booting up a real Windows PC.

From a cold start, in which the app must launch as well as the virtual machine, it’s about double that to resume, but that’s still pretty impressive. On my Intel iMac, Parallels 17 gets very close to instantaneous suspend and resume times, with three seconds to suspend and just two seconds to resume, when Parallels is running. It works so well, you can even suspend the guest operating system while it’s doing something as critical as applying a software update without doing harm. When they need to work on it again, they just resume it, and the virtual machine wakes up in the same state as before. This takes the current state of the machine running in the host Mac’s memory and saves it to disk (or an SSD). One of the things many Parallel users do frequently is suspend a virtual machine, rather than shutting it down, when they are no longer using it. That’s true on the Intel side for Parallels 17, though I’d have to say that version 16 was pretty damned zippy. If the topic of virtualization interests you, check out some more of our posts on the subject.With each annual release, Parallels is touted as being faster than the previous year’s version. There are many other options available for virtualization, including the free UTM app which allows you to easily run Windows 11 on an Apple Silicon Mac for example, but there’s also paid solutions including VMWare and Parallels.

Go to to find the appropriate download, listed as “Developer preview for macOS / Arm64 (M1/M2) hosts”.

As usual, VirtualBox is completely free to download and to use.

While technically in beta, anyone can get access to the developer preview beta ARM build of VirtualBox through the VirtualBox website. It does this by virtualizing hardware (that you can adjust to allocate RAM, storage capacity, etc), so the operating system itself doesn’t know that it’s not running on actual hardware. VirtualBox is virtualization software that allows you to run other operating systems in containers on your Mac directly from the application, for example you can run Linux or Windows directly within VirtualBox, and without having to use dual-booting or anything else.

Macbook air parallels