If you’re so inclined, it’s easier than ever to run Windows 11 on iPad

Who doesn’t love the kind of hack that gets familiar software running on something you wouldn’t expect it to? In the smartphone world, the master of that kind of change-up has got to be the old HTC HD2, which only ever officially ran Windows Mobile, but fans ported everything from Windows Phone 7 to Android 7.0 Nougat over to the versatile handheld. We’ve also seen multiple attempts to bring full-blown Windows to some very much not-PC hardware, like that impressive Pixel Watch hack we checked out a few weeks back. Now we’re looking at a newly streamlined way to get Windows 11 running on an Apple iPad.

Even with Apple hardware as historically locked down as it’s been, this isn’t the first time we’ve looked at Windows on an Apple tablet. It was actually two years ago this week that we shared our journey trying to get Windows 11 running on an iPad Air M1. In the end, it worked, but it felt like we were pulling teeth every step along the way, and in the end performance was just abysmal. Well, speed still leaves a lot to be desired, but if you’re inclined to give a project like this a spin, it’s now a little more accessible — at least for some iPad users.

Over on X, NTDEV shares their recent effort to pull off this same trick, getting Windows 11 for ARM running on an iPad — this time the M2 version of the Air (via Windows Latest). The approach they took largely mirrors our own, leaning on the UTM emulator for iOS and using a custom Tiny 11 modification of Windows to reduce bloat. This time around, though, there’s been one very important change to how Apple manages its walled garden.

We’re talking about Apple’s reluctant support for alternative app stores in the EU, which it’s now obligated to provide access to.  The same AltStore that brought us the iPhone’s first “official” porn app makes it that much easier for iPad owners in Europe to now access UTM, and that’s just what NTDEV did.

Although they claim Windows 11 “actually works quite decently” with this kind of ARM emulation going on, without proper virtualization support we’re just never going to see performance that has any chance of approaching that of a dedicated Windows tablet, let alone iOS on the iPad itself.

The coolness factor here is still hard to deny, and with this newly lowered bar of entry, we wouldn’t be surprised to hear about more iPad owners giving Windows a spin — at least just to say they did.