I replaced my Windows laptop with an M2 MacBook Air, then installed Windows 11 on it

I love Windows. I grew up with Windows 98 and Windows XP, my first laptop ran Windows 7, and when Windows 10 came along—we don’t talk about Windows 8—it was just another perfect evolution of the tried and trusted operating system. I even somehow become the advocate for Windows around the office, and heck I’ve even installed Windows 11 on an old OnePlus 6.

That being said, Windows-powered laptops have always been a bit of a mixed bag. While I love how powerful and versatile gaming machines are, I know that for many who just want a laptop for everyday use at work or college, the MacBook seems to be the preferred option. When I was in university for instance, for every Windows laptop you could see many, many more MacBooks.

Even in the SoyaCincau office, Mac users currently outnumber Windows 12 to 6. And despite my love for Windows, I’m about to make it 13 to 5, as I have switched from my tried and tested Realme Book to the latest MacBook Air with Apple’s latest M2 chip. Except, I’m also kinda making the score 13 to 6—I can explain.

Meet Parallels

…or to use its full name, Parallels Desktop 18 for Mac. It is essentially a hardware emulation virtualisation program, designed and supposedly optimised with the MacOS operating system in mind. You can pretty much use it to run WIndows or even Linux distros (albeit only on Intel Macs you can install Linux on Apple M-chips, you just need an ARM-based image) on your Apple-made computer, with Parallels Desktop 18 for Mac advertised as a seamless, easy to set up and fast way to get Windows running on a Mac.

Upon installation, the Parallels launch wizard will help guide you through the setup, asking you your intention behind using Parallels. It then automatically configures your machine for Windows, with up to 4 CPU cores and 8GB of RAM to be allocated for your virtual machine with more available in the more expensive Pro and Business editions of Parallels. It’ll allow you to have Windows running either in windowed, full screen or picture-in-picture mode right off your laptop, and with its Coherence mode you can run Windows applications on your Mac as though they were native programs. This means you can have programs like the Microsoft Store and the Xbox App sitting next to Safari and Apple Music on your Dock.

Parallels also claims that Parallels Desktop 18 for Mac has been optimised for Apple Silicon M-series chips, bringing compatibility with ProMotion displays on supported devices such as the MacBook Pro 14. There’s also improved USB 3.0 support, better disk space control, simplified sharing options between the host MacBook and the Windows VM along with a supposedly better gaming experience.

With all that in mind, I decided to take it out for a spin—but I didn’t want to spend too much either on the ‘Mac’ part of running Parallels. As such, I went with the base model MacBook Air M2, with 8GB of RAM and 256GB of storage. It works more than fine out of the box, and is the cheapest laptop Cupertino offers with the M2 processor under the hood. As for Parallels, I’m going with the Standard edition because it’s a single purchase; the Pro and Business Editions of the program are subscription-only. I also set it up for as much performance as possible, which isn’t actually much because I’m using the 8GB MacBook Air; I had it run Windows 11 with four CPU cores and 5.5GB of RAM.

A MacBook Air on Windows sounds great right?

I mean, what’s there not to like? Despite my affinity for Windows, I can admit that compared to my old Realme Book or even the latest ultraportables around, the MacBook Air’s hardware is just much better. The all aluminium unibody chassis, that 13.6-inch, Liquid Retina display and S-tier touchpad puts it comfortably ahead of most Windows laptops, with only the likes of the Microsoft Surface Laptop or the Dell XPS 13 lineups that could kinda compete with how premium Apple’s laptops are.

And with Parallels, you’re putting together the better operating system (sorry Tim) with some of the best hardware in the laptop scene. With that in mind, I decided to try out a slew of older single player games together with a couple of eSports titles. I mean, if you could play games on the MacBook Air now, then do you really need a gaming PC anymore?

Yes. Yes you do. Because despite the help of Windows to help these games run, the games ran pretty rough, with some not even launching at all. Those that do run though should still be somewhat playable on lower resolutions, just expect some stuttering here and there. Now I do want to say that we probably aren’t giving Parallels a fair chance here because they had suggested at least 16GB of RAM for gaming, but they did also say that it will run on a MacBook Air with 8GB of RAM anyway—just not great.

In fact, if you’re thinking of getting Parallels mainly to play games on your MacBook, I’m going to stop you right there. Regardless of what machine you’re running, Parallels currently does not support DirectX 12, only DirectX 11. This means that most newer games will not run on your Mac via Parallels even if it works just fine on a regular Windows device. That’s why we ended up benchmarking mostly older titles on our Windows MacBook Air.

On top of that, you should note that games with anti-cheat software or copyright protection such as Vanguard and Denuvo will also not work on Parallels; this probably caused CS:GO to crash in the first place.

On top of that, general performance when using Windows on the MacBook Air was pretty sluggish to say the least. It’s not outright terrible but compared to just using MacOS, you might be better off learning the way of the Cupertino than using Parallels if you don’t have to. I mean, it’s fast to boot into the Windows environment and it’ll run stuff like your web browser, your music streaming apps and messaging platforms like Discord just fine, but trying to induce more performance out of it can be frustrating at times. You’ve already seen how rough it was in games, and unfortunately it gets a little worse in synthetic benchmarks too:

The MacBook Air scored just 622 points in our Cinebench R23 single core test run, with its multi core tests resulting in 1,807 points. For context, the MacBook Air with its M2 processor would normally have scored around the 1,500 mark in single core runs and over 8,000 points on the multi core benchmark. I mean, the Windows VM was running on just half the CPU cores and only 5.5GB of RAM so this lacklustre performance isn’t that surprising, but when you’re used to a responsive computer this can get a little jarring.

One thing that did seem cool though is how integrated the ‘Windows’ install was with MacOS. Like a parasitic symbiotic relationship, the Windows VM enjoys the benefit of the host MacOS system by bring able to take files off the main MacOS system such as images and text and place it directly into Windows. his made it pretty easy to continue off from where I was with MacOS right in Windows itself, and meant I didn’t need to copy over all my files from MacOS onto the Windows VM.

However, it wasn’t enough to convince me to fully use Windows via Parallels on a MacBook Air as despite the sluggish performance and mediocre gaming experience, the biggest dealbreaker was the abysmal battery performance I ended up with.

For context, the current generation MacBook Air is perhaps one of if not the best laptop in the market right now if you want long lasting battery life. Using the MacBook Air for its intended purposes, I would be able to comfortably get two days of use out of it for work and some YouTube on the side too.

But with Parallels running and requiring so much power to run it, not even the efficiency of the Apple M2 chip can save it from just a mere three to five hours of battery life, though I’m sure the cynics among you will claim that that’s the norm for budget Windows laptops anyway. With such poor battery life I just couldn’t continue on anymore on the Windows MacBook Air train any longer. Parallels did have a Windows in Travel Mode that they say will extend the MacBook battery life, but not by much, stretching it out maybe a hour longer at most.

You’re probably much better off with a real Windows laptop

As you can probably tell from my experience with Parallels, I’m not fully convinced that running Windows 11 in a virtual environment on a MacBook Air is worth the hassle. Performance was middling at best, and it just seemed that if I wanted to really enjoy any of the supposed benefits that Parallels is claiming, I’ll need to be running MacOS on a much more capable device such as a MacBook Pro or a Mac Studio desktop instead which packs processors like the Apple M2 Pro and better. If you still want to run it on a MacBook Air though I’d highly suggest only doing so if your laptop has at least 16GB of RAM.

However, it’s probably the price that threw me off the idea of Parallels Desktop the most. A copy of Parallels Desktop 18 for Mac Standard Edition will set you back a cool USD99.99 (~RM443.74). Parallels Desktop 18 for Mac Pro Edition meanwhile will require you to pay USD119.99 (~RM546.07) per year with the Business Edition coming in at USD149.99 (~RM682.60) per year. If you want more advanced features or just wish to allocate more hardware towards the Windows VM on your machine, you’ll want to get the latter two versions too.

That’s not to say that there aren’t valid reasons for getting Parallels Desktop 18. Now I probably wasn’t its target demographic anyway, but if you’re a student in university for example and all you have is a MacBook Air or a MacBook Pro but your course requires you to run a Windows-only program for example, then getting a copy of Parallels Desktop 18 for Mac will be much cheaper than having to get a new laptop altogether. Similarly, if your work requires a program that runs only on Windows but you already use a Mac machine, then it might be easier to have Parallels on your machine and boot it up whenever needed, especially if you’re a freelancer for instance.

However, within the same price category as the Apple MacBook Air M2, you can find plenty of premium Windows laptops such as the Asus Zenbook 14X OLED, Acer Swift 14, Microsoft Surface Laptop 5 and Dell XPS 13. If Windows is what you’re after, then by all means, get a good Windows laptop instead.