Probably the most useful button for new UTM users is Browse UTM Gallery. The UTM Gallery, showing virtual machines for several operating systems

That was easy, wasn’t it? Now launch UTM, and a screen similar to this appears: Press the Command Key, then drag the UTM application icon from the disk image to the Applications folder. If you download the app directly, a disk image file named UTM.dmg appears in your download folder. If you purchased UTM from the Mac App Store, installation is done for you. I would suggest downloading and using UTM for Mac for free if you end up using it regularly for work or pleasure, purchase it. Your purchase also funds the future development of UTM. Why would you want to pay $9.99 when the app is free? Because you’ll get automatic updates just like any other Mac app downloaded from the Mac App Store. To download the app you go directly to the app download page and either click the Download button or click the  Mac App Store button to pay $9.99 for the app. It’s quite simple to download UTM for Mac. Let’s see an example of how UTM works on M1 Macs. However, your devices must be running iOS 11 – 13 iOS 14 requires a jailbreak. If you’ve ever had a burning desire to run Windows on an iPhone or iPad, UTM does the job. UTM also works on “the other Apple Silicon”, with versions of both iOS and iPadOS. It’s free to download or $9.99 on the Mac App Store. That’s why I was happy to see that there is a VM environment that works on M1 Macs – UTM.

VMWare has pledged an Apple Silicon version of Fusion, but it won’t support Windows virtual machines! There’s still no word on whether the free VirtualBox VM environment will ever be updated to run on Apple Silicon. UPDATE (July 9, 2021): Parallels Desktop now runs on Apple Silicon, a solution that was not available in March of 2021 when this article was first published. UTM (which I believe stands for Universal Turing Machine) is an open source virtual machine environment. While you might be spending most of your time in macOS 11 Big Sur, your job might require you to use Windows-only apps, Perhaps you need a Linux VM for development work.

Your shiny and speedy new Apple Silicon Mac is missing something – the ability to run virtual machines.

Minimal windows 10 virtualbox image