Apple macOS and Power Platform - Introduction

After watching numerous YouTube videos about the new Mac Mini M4 I decided to buy it, here a photo beside my mouse:

It's not my first Apple computer, I have a MacBook Air 2012 that I still use these days for browsing and of course I am a bit locked inside the ecosystem with my iPhone.

The majority (if not all) of the videos and articles about the new Mac Mini M4 is about editing videos, games and general productivity. All the reviews are ok but I wanted to know how this machine performs for MY work, considering I spend several hours with Visual Studio 2022.

I bought the basic model (16 GB of RAM and 256 GB of storage) for two reasons:

• It's the entry level (so the cheapest model)
• RAM is not expandable, so I want to know if they are enough or not (because RAM on these machines is expensive)

First of all: all the activities where only a browser is required works perfectly (basic tasks like modifying a table or adding a column) but I am sure everybody knows this.

Which is the first tool I need for my Power Platform activities? Of course XrmToolBox!

Let's go technical, this new Mac Mini M4 is an ARM machine and the current virtualization technology only allows (with decent performance) to run Windows 11 Arm edition, let's try it.

There are several virtualization software: Parallels, VMware and VirtualBox.

I like and use VirtualBox on Windows but I am not convinced of its performances about Windows 11 Arm.

I use Parallels but it's a paid product, I already spent money to buy the machine, let's skip it for now.

VMware offers a free version of VMware Fusion Pro, so I decided to use it.

You can follow this YouTube video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LWXO4DhQRL0

Note: the download page is a bit different now, you need to download the latest version of the software and when you run the setup you get prompted to obtain the free version (some of the comments in the video are about this step).

The video also provides the step to install Windows 11, so it was perfect for me.

After I completed the installation, the question is: will XrmToolBox works?

And the answer is YES!

I quickly downloaded some tools (the one I used the most), in particular:

• FetchXML Builder by Jonas Rapp (the most downloaded tool)
• Plugin Registration Tool (a must for the work I do)
• Custom API Manager by David Rivard (I am an avid user of this tool)
• Ribbon Workbench by Scott Durow (still required sometimes)
• Dataverse REST Builder by me

I don't know if they work 100% of the cases but I didn't experience crashes and also Ribbon Workbench that is still using the old Internet Explorer engine works under Windows 11 Arm.

My tool uses the WebView2 component (based on Edge) so I also wanted to know if it works as well.

The virtual machine to run Windows 11 Arm is configured with only 4 GB of RAM (Windows and XrmToolBox works fine), the used RAM in the moment I am writing is around 12 GB but I have several apps opened (including Teams for Mac occupying 800 MB and Google Chrome taking 1 GB), with only the Virtual Machine opened you use 8/9 GB total of RAM. In my opinion 16 GB of RAM to use XrmToolBox inside a Virtual Machine are enough, my goal is not to use the Virtual Machine for everything (I don't plan to install Visual Studio 2022 inside it) but only for the apps I cannot use directly on macOS.

I will be able to use this new Mac for everything? Let's see in the next episodes!