I recently wrote about theM4 Mac ’s compelling lineupand it ’s a capital fourth dimension to buy a Mac . However , one character of drug user will want to hold off on a purchase .

concord toHoward Oakley of The Eclectic Light Company , the new M4 Macs will not allow virtual machine software program to run decent . Users who need to run macOS versions erstwhile than Ventura 13.4 through virtualization will find oneself that the virtual machine will not reboot and users terminate up with a blank sieve . Since the practical machine ( VM ) wo n’t bring up at all , there ’s no fashion to get at the logarithm to see what could be the problem .

Oakley report that Activity Monitor shows that with the VM , only one CPU core is active even though multiple burden are allocated . This could entail that the issue happens “ before the VM kernel boots the other essence , an consequence that occurs early on during the nitty-gritty boot stage . Until that point , pre - boot form and the center lead on just a single CPU core . ”

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This limitation means that VMs on M4 Macs can only run macOS Ventura 13.4 and later . The military issue does n’t affect M1 , M2 , and M3 Macs , which can run VMs with macOS Monterey 12 or afterward . M - serial Macs can not run VMs of macOS Big Sur 11 or before . Oakley has tried running the VM on a single central processor core , but it still did not work on the M4 .

The issuance has been report to Apple but it ’s unclear if a fixture can or will be made useable . Oakley intimate that Apple could set the issue by modifying the kernel of the older interpretation of macOS , but that seems like a task Apple is n’t run to do . So for now , if run older versions of macOS is vital to your work flow , you might want to hold off on a fresh M4 purchase — or at least keep an elderly Mac around .