Additionally, paying for it also supports the development of UTM. The key reason for paying is to get automatic updates whenever there is one. The only difference between the two methods is for the Mac App Store, you need to pay $10 while the direct download is free. QEMU can work as an emulator as well as a virtualizer, where it can achieve near native performance by executing the guest code directly on the host CPU. Because of the need to perform the translation on-the-fly, emulation is typically slower than virtualization. You can think of the emulator as an interpreter translating the instruction in x86 or AMD64 to ARM64. In emulation mode, the virtual machine will emulate the hardware using software. This is because the Windows OS is compiled for a different architecture (which is x86 or AMD64) while Apple Silicon is using ARM64 (aarch64). On the other hand, however, if you try to run a copy of Windows that is compiled for x86 or AMD64 on an Apple Silicon Mac, you cannot use virtualization. This means that you can run another copy of macOS (or as many as the system memory allows) directly on your Mac CPU. If your Mac uses an Apple Silicon (M1 or M2) chip, you can virtualize a copy of macOS that is compiled for ARM64 (aarch64) unmodified. Virtualization involves simulating part of the computer’s hardware. So what is the difference these two terms? Notice that two terms are tossed around when we discuss UTM - virtualization and emulation. UTM only runs on macOS (11.0 or later) Virtualization vs Emulation You can also use emulation to run x86/圆4 OSes on Apple Silicon as well as ARM64 OSes on Intel, albeit with slower performances than using virtualization. And on Intel Macs, x86/圆4 operating system can also be virtualized. On Apple Silicon Macs, UTM uses Apple’s Hypervisor virtualization framework to run ARM64-based operating systems. The best way to think of UTM is that it is a GUI version of QEMU, without needing you to have the knowledge to grapple with the plethora of command line options and flags of QEMU. It emulates the machine’s processor through dynamic binary translation and provides a set of different hardware and device models for the machine, enabling it to run a variety of guest operating systems. Basically, UTM allows you to run Windows, Linux, and more on your Mac, iPhone, and iPad. UTM (based on QEMU) is a full featured system emulator and virtual machine host for iOS and macOS.

And best of all, you can even run multiple instances of macOS! What is UTM? Instead, for this article, I want to introduce you to a free way to run multiple virtual machines on your Apple Silicon Macs.

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