Windows 11 Installed and Launched on Apple iPad Air for the First Time

Apple refuses to bundle iPad tablets with macOS, which is designed for computers, so enthusiast NTDEV installed a more flexible platform on one of these devices – Windows 11. More precisely, Tiny11 was installed on the iPad Air with the M2 processor – a lightweight version of Windows 11, which, given the circumstances, coped quite well with the proposed hardware.

As you might expect from an unofficial version of Windows 11 that was also launched on unsupported hardware, Tiny11 is a bit of a sluggish performer on the iPad Air. So this is more of a curious tech demo than a viable option for tablet owners. Apple fans have been clamoring for some form of full-fledged macOS on the iPad for years now, a desire that only intensified when the iPads began running on the same chips as MacBooks. It was recently announced that iPadOS would become even more like macOS with the next update, but Apple has yet to commit to bringing the desktop platform to tablets.

The experiment was conducted by an enthusiast known under the pseudonym NTDEV — the developer of Tiny11, an unofficial lightweight version of Windows 11. He explained that the platform is launched using UTM (Universal Terminal Manager) and JIT (Just-In-Time) emulation, which offers high performance, but without the auxiliary tools Tiny11 would clearly work faster.

This isn’t the first time the enthusiast has launched Tiny11 with limited resources: the platform previously managed with a system that had only 184 MB of RAM; once, a 100 MB build of Windows 11 without a graphical interface was even released. Thanks to NTDEV’s efforts, the Tiny11 platform can take up only 8 GB after installation on a PC – the official Windows 11 requires about 20 GB.