I know that Parallels and Bootbamp don’t yet work with the Apple Silicon M1 chip so the advice is to stay with Intel Macs if a Windows environment on your Mac is essential.
But what about Microsoft Remote Desktop, which accesses an actual machine? Is there any reason why that wouldn’t work? I use it quite a lot for work.
AFAIK, Microsoft hasn’t announced anything about MRD for M1 Macs. They do have an IOS app, Remote Desktop Mobile. And I’ve used Screens on my iPad to connect to Windows in years past so perhaps one of these would work in the short term. Since this is important for your work, I’d probably wait on M1 until I was sure I had a solution.
I have been able to use Microsoft RDP from the Mac App Store to access a work system. I didn’t test everything, but the initial connection worked well.
There’s no reason why RDP/RDS shouldn’t work. It doesn’t depend on the client OS/hardware to run Windows on the server.
Seems to be fine here on M1 mini I picked up on Friday last week.
I tried it accessing our work RDS farm, with OpSwat as the security gateway. OpSwat and the MS Remote Desktop client both kick in Rosetta 2, so there’s a delay on initial launch, but on the whole it’s indistinguishable from me using the same system via iPadOS or Windows. Just appears to work, and there have been no niggles at all for me.
They also have a Remote Desktop app in the Mac App Store. I don’t know if its good or not.
I have the MS Remote Desktop from the MAS on my iMac (2017 i7), and it works great. It’s regularly updated too. The only limitation seems to be the internet connection… when the connection gets wonky or slow (not often at my house), it lags a bit.