How to Upgrade Windows 10 Boot Camp to 11 on Intel Mac

by Rian

In coming months, Windows 10 will be sunset and Microsoft is aggressively pushing the users to upgrade to either Windows 11 or Windows 11 compatible hardwares. If you were on Windows 10, for the same reasons as I did, it is largely due to several factors that happen to line up like the stars: Mac transitioned to Apple Silicon, Qualcomm exclusivity deal for Windows on ARM, to name the few.

Boot Camp Assistant, as far as I know, still does not support fresh installing Windows 11. The last Intel Macs that were able to appreciate the dual OS setup did not meet the minimum requirements for Windows 11, mainly its CPU. Microsoft did shift away its policy to more inclusive requirements since, by then Apple had already moved most of its Mac lines to Apple Silicon; where Windows on ARM limited its availability on non-Qualcomm devices.

Solutions

Again, it’s written with the prerequisite that is the Windows 10 Boot Camp is already up and running. If not, after step 1, make a fresh installation of Windows 10. We will also need to manually install Boot Camp drivers on Windows 11.

  1. From Boot Camp Assistant, Action in menu bar > Select “Download Windows Support Software”. Save it an external drive or thumb drive for later use.
  2. Boot to Windows 10 Bootcamp. Download official Windows 11 iso from the link, or from the Microsoft website.
  3. Mount the iso and check its driver letter.
  4. From Command Prompt with administrative privilege, run following commands:
[drive letter]:\
setup.exe /product server
  1. The installation will start as the Windows Server. Once completed, install the drivers from step 1.

Afterthoughts

As I understand it, Microsoft has already approved Parallels to be the official way of running Windows on Apple Silicon devices. I don’t see the current status quo changing anytime soon, and I’m not sure why either companies would hurry along to support running Windows natively on non-Windows machine, irregardless of possible patent dispute.

For what it’s worth, Parallels and other virtualization or emulation softwares are now offering stable and practical solutions to ease the need of having Windows running natively. Some even suggest Apple Silicon and GPTK make all-rounder of a laptop. We may never get native support on Bootcamp, but I think we can rest easy knowing that the new hardwares are sufficiently capable.

– How-to / /

Leave a comment