I've decided to be patient and wait till Virtual Box has an ARM64 virtual environment or perhaps we can transition to Docker. These new Macs are still the best choice because they do everything else so well. The short time frame and zero support from our previous vendor has had me a bit frustrated and the virtualization issue just got to me the other day. So it has been like solving a jigsaw puzzle to find compatible hardware and software that will work together and meet our regulatory and PCI Compliance requirements. The ERP was integrated with our website and other record keeping systems.

The software vendor for our ERP system (which was only compatible with El Capitan or older OS X) gave us a 4 month notice that they were sunsetting the software with no feasible upgrade path (and disabling the ability for it to run past the deadline). Our original iMacs are 2011 models and won't accept an OS X version newer than El Capitan, unfortunately. 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.

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