Apple's ARM-based chips have changed the calculus for running macOS in a virtual machine. A new benchmark analysis shows that virtualized macOS on Apple Silicon loses almost no real-world performance compared to running it natively — a stark contrast to the clunky x86 virtualization of the Intel era.
The more surprising finding is how small these VMs can get. Researchers found they could pare down a functional macOS environment to a few gigabytes, stripping away much of the operating system's bulk while keeping apps like Safari and Xcode operational. That's a fraction of the 30GB+ footprint a typical macOS install demands.
Why this matters: virtualization on Apple Silicon opens macOS to uses that were previously impractical — cheap CI/CD runners, quick testing environments, even running macOS on cheaper hardware than Apple's officially supports. The efficiency gains also mean you could run multiple macOS VMs on a single machine without the performance tanking that x86 Macs suffered.
The catch, as always with Apple: this only works on Apple hardware. The company has locked down the M-series chips' virtualization capabilities in ways that make running macOS VMs on non-Apple hardware legally and technically difficult.