Windows 11 is easier to run on an iPad than ever — with some big caveats

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.