One of the things I appreciate about my Macs is their longevity. It's 2025, and, while showing signs of its age, my Macbook Pro 2012 is still useful. In fact, I only recently replaced it with a used 2018 Mac Mini, out of which I hope to get several more years while I figure out how to solve the problem with running Windows applications on ARM-based/M-Series/Apple Silicon machines.
Bootcamp is a huge feature for me since some of my mission-critical applications are Windows-Only. I was getting close to purchasing an M-Series machine, but when I checked into the dual-booting capabilities I discovered that Apple abandoned Bootcamp on their newer M-Series Macs. That's understandable, given the drastically different architectures, but that leaves me with limited options. From prior experience, I've seen that virtualization can cause problems with the additional layers interfering with windows applications that want to talk to hardware at a lower level of abstraction that the virtual environment will allow. I need to be able to control my ham radio equipment from Windows applications which don't always play nicely in virtual environments such as Parallels.
One possibility I've considered is to setup a small, "headless" windows machine exclusively for running my ham station which I can control remotely. This has some appeal since I don't have to keep switching between MacOS and Windows whenever I want to operate a ham radio contest. In any case, things have come a long way since the last time I ran parallels or any other virtual environment, so perhaps that's still an option. For now, I'm locked into Bootcamp and hope my "new" Mac Mini can get me through another five or six years while I do the research into the best way to solve this problem for my admittedly rare combination of computing needs.
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