For years, people have speculated about the ability to run iOS apps on the Mac. This speculation was caused by the increasing similarity in the user experiences across the Mac, the iPhone and the iPad, and by Apple’s continuing tech demos showing their work on this capability.
Well, that day has finally arrived. Parallels® just released a new version of the Parallels® Access iOS client that can also be run on an M1 Mac.
Parallels Desktop 16.5 for Mac natively supports Mac computers with either Apple M1 chips or Intel processors. Parallels Desktop 16.5 uses 2.5 times less energy on an M1 MacBook than a 2020. Parallels Desktop for Mac has been updated today to support Apple’s new M1-based Macs. Parallels Desktop 16.5 for Mac also supports guest operating systems (OSs) on M1 Mac computers including Linux distributives Ubuntu 20.04, Kali Linux 2021.1, Debian 10.7 and Fedora Workstation 33-1.2. “I absolutely love being able to run Linux environments within Parallels Desktop 16.5 on my M1 Mac,” said Darren Paxton, United Kingdom. I feel like the CPU capped at 1.0 GHz is the issue perhaps? The 2014 air on bootcamp gets 3.9 GHz where as the M1 Mac mini runs a flat 1.0 GHz. Also as far as optimization, trying to set it to parallels instead of Apple repeatedly tells me to restart Mac and doesn't let me launch parallels while it's selected as parallels. When Apple Silicon Mac was first announced during the keynote at WWDC on June 22 of this year, Apple demoed a Parallels Desktop for Mac prototype running a Linux virtual machine flawlessly on.
I will admit that I was never really that interested in running an iOS app on my Mac, but I now see that I was wrong. This is pretty neat! In addition to Parallels Access, I installed a few other iOS apps on my Mac, among them, HBO Max. In general, a dedicated, special built app will almost always be better than using a webpage with similar functionality. And that is true for Parallels Access and true for HBO Max.
![Parallels Desktop For Mac With Apple M1 Parallels Desktop For Mac With Apple M1](/uploads/1/1/8/4/118482648/283302835.jpg)
How to install an iOS app on an M1 Mac
The process of finding iOS apps that you want to download and install on an M1 Mac is a bit obtuse right now. (Figure 1). You use the App Store, but to find the iOS apps, you must first go to your account by clicking on your name in the main App Store window, and then use the selector buttons “Mac Apps” or “iPhone & iPad Apps” and choose “iPhone & iPad Apps”. Then you can search for the iOS app you want, for example “Parallels Access”. Hopefully, this will be easier and less circuitous in the future.
If you can’t find an iOS app that you know exists, this may be because the developer has marked the app as not downloadable on a Mac. This is often because the developer has not yet tested the iOS app on the Mac.
Running the Parallels Access iOS client on a Mac
Parallels On M1 Macbook
Running the Parallels Access iOS client on a Mac looks just like using it on an iPad (Figure 2).
In this figure you can see that I have seven remote computers set up in Parallels Access: three MacBook Pros, two 27˝ iMac computers, one 21˝ iMac running macOS Catalina, and a really old ThinkPad running Windows 7. I can access any of them from the Parallels Access client on my iPad or on my M1 MacBook Pro. (Of course, I can also access these remote computers from any computer with a modern browser, but that is not the focus of this post.) Most importantly, the experiences on the M1 Mac and the iPad are nearly identical. The Mac has no touch screen, and the iPad has no mouse, but aside from these differences, Parallels Access is the same on both platforms.
Video 1 shows some of the Parallels Access functionality from the iOS client running on the M1 MacBook Pro. You can see the Remote Assistance feature added to Parallels Access last summer is available in Parallels Access when you run it on the M1 Mac.
I am also happy to report that the amusing “bug” that is present in almost every remote access application is present in Parallels Access on the M1 Mac: the ability to recursively access the very computer you are running the application from. You can see the result of this in Figure 3.
If you have an M1 Mac, let us know in the comments what iOS apps you have installed on it.
Parallels Access terminology check
Parallels Desktop For Mac Free Trial
Parallels Access is composed of two pieces of software: The Parallels Access client, which is installed on your phone or tablet, and the Parallels Access agent, which is installed on your Mac and PC. These two pieces of software work together to deliver remote access to your Mac and PC. You may have heard that:
Macbook M1 Parallel Desktop
The latest version of Parallels Access is a universal binary, meaning it contains the necessary code to run at full speed on either Mac with Intel processor or Mac with the Apple M1 chip.
Mac Mini M1 Parallels
This is true, but at the time that this was written, the only part of Parallels Access that ran on the Mac was the agent, so saying that the agent is now a universal binary is unnecessary. Well, the world has changed. Since Parallels Access can now run on the Mac—actually only on a Mac with an M1 chip—I would re-word that earlier statement to become:
The latest version of the Parallels Access agent is a universal binary, meaning it contains the necessary code to run at full speed on either Mac with Intel processor or Mac with the Apple M1 chip.
The M1 Mac’s inability to run Windows might seems like an obvious limitation, but it’s actually a major issue for a lot of Mac users. Boot Camp is gone so you can’t run Windows natively, which means you need to use a virtualization app. A few months ago, Parallels previewed its Parallels Desktop for Mac virtualization software on M1 Macs, and on Wednesday, the company annnounced that Parallels Desktop 16.5 for Mac—which brings full native support for both M1 and Intel Macs—is out of beta and now available to the general public.
If you want to run Windows on your M1 Mac, you can launch Parallels Desktop 16.5 to run the Windows 10 ARM Insider Preview, the only version of Windows that can run on Apple silicon. To get the Insider Preview, you need to register for Microsoft’s Insider Program. Keep in mind that this is beta, so some features may not work, and it isn’t optimized for performance.
Despite the lack of optimization on Microsoft’s part, Parallels claims that performance of Windows 10 ARM is 30 percent better on an M1 Mac than Windows on an Intel Core i9 MacBook Pro, and DirectX performance is 60 percent better compared to a MacBook Pro with a Radeon Pro 555X GPU. And the M1 Mac uses 2.5 less energy than a 2020 Intel MacBook Air, the company says.
The major features that were in the version 16 release are fully available on M1 Macs, including Coherence Mode, Mac keyboard layouts, Shared Profiles, Touch Bar controls, and more. Parallels says that it “hopes” to add the ability to run macOS Big Sur in a virtual machine later this year.
Parallels Desktop 16.5 for Mac is $79.99 for a new subscription or $99.99 for a new perpetual license. An upgrade from Parallels Desktop 14 or 15 to a perpetual license is $49.99.