My bad for not specifically Googling 'SoftwareX won't run on Apple Silicon' for each piece of software we use. It wasn't until we got the first shipment of iMacs that I actually tried to start a VM and got a kernel error that I realized I was hosed.

I just didn't have a virtual machine to start at the time. So I did a demo and VirtualBox installed on the new M1 and it ran just fine, no grayed out icon with a slash through it, so I thought it would work. But all they could say is 'we don't know'. Maybe I'm alone in my thinking that when you stop supporting product X and replace it with an improved product Y, one would expect that the new version will still do all the things the previous version did AND MORE.Īnd it would have been nice for the folks at Apple to have told me about these issues when I asked them BEFORE we decided to purchase 15 of these not-quite-ready-for-prime-time M1 iMacs. These new Macs also won't talk to our Apple Server to do network user authentication when Filevault is turned on. We have Parallels on a couple of Macs, but it's soooo bloated that you can't get decent performance while it's running so I don't see it as a viable option. So I can't boot into an ARM based Linux Distro either. Also they got rid of bootcamp and you can't boot from a USB stick either. I thought 'Rosetta' was supposed provide x86 emulation to bridge the gap between x86 apps and Apple Silicon but apparently not.

So tired of being 'upgraded' out of a functioning machine.Īpple won't provide OS upgrades for our older x86 iMacs (which still run great) and the replacement iMacs won't run several key applications for development like VirtualBox and Vagrant.

Download virtualbox mac m1