This past week, Microsoft updated its official lite version of Windows 11 called Validation OS which is mainly meant for evaluating and validating hardware. With the update, it now supports Windows 11 version 24H2.
So if you are not a hardware vendor, you probably do not have much need for that. That"s where the highly popular unofficial lightweight Windows images from NTDEV come in.
If you are not familiar, X user NTDEV is known for creating modified, stripped-off Windows images that are meant to be free from all the bloatware that users do not need. Lite versions of both Windows 11 and 10 exist in the form of tiny11 and tiny10.
On their official X handle this past weekend, NTDEV published about their experience running tiny11 core on an Apple iPhone 15 Pro. They note that the boot-up was extremely slow taking 20 minutes but the experiment was still fun as it is probably the first-ever instance of running Windows 11 on an iPhone.
The UTM SE emulator, which landed in the Apple App Store last week, was used for the test.
Behold, probably the very first instance of Windows 11 (in form of tiny11 core) on UTM SE.
— NTDEV (@NTDEV_) July 20, 2024
It is TERRIBLY slow, booting in about 20 minutes, but nonetheless, it"s still Windows 11 on an iPhone 15 Pro! pic.twitter.com/Iyr5Txy8uh
For those wondering about the differences between tiny11 and tiny11 core, compared to the vanilla one, the "core" variant further reduces the size of the Windows installation pretty heftily such that it may require just around three gigs of space.
In case you need a refresher on the hardware specifications of the Apple iPhone 15 Pro, the device packs the 6-core A17 Bionic chipset with a 6-core GPU, and 16-core Neural Engine. It has 8GB of system RAM.