Apple recently approved a new emulator app called UTM SE that enables your iPhone or iPad (or Vision Pro!) to masquerade as PC hardware and run honest-to-goodness computer desktop operating systems. Some of you asked in the comments section of my last story how it runs — a fair question that I couldn’t answer at the time. But now that I’ve tried it a little, I have answers, and I can say this much: it’s better than I expected, but I wouldn’t count on it for too much.
That’s because it doesn’t use a just-in-time (JIT) compiler, which translates software into code that your device understands before it’s executed. JIT compilers go against Apple’s software guidelines for the App Store, so you’d have to jailbreak your phone to install a v...
