It uses the iphone processor (which I think still might be one of those Mchips?) so I think it was ok to be unsure.

The M line was derived from the A line in the phones, and the individual cores are generally the same (though not in the same year). Counts, accelerators, other stuff on package/die is custom.

I think it was a fair question too. Even if things should be capable it was always possible the feature would be disabled in hardware or software somehow.

And with iPhones never running VMs as far as I know, we didn’t know if it was capable at all.

UTM seems to make VMs available on iOS (with App Store limitations) although I've only used it on Mac: https://docs.getutm.app/

I thought it was emulating everything like QEMU, not using virtualization hardware like you normally would on a computer.

You might be right. QEMU doesn't always make clear when you're running emulated or virtualized.

The odds of it not running at all were low but the performance is the real factor for whether it can _practically_ run a windows VM.

Virtualization requires specific hardware support to be performant. There are ways to do complete software emulation of a virtual machine but it would be so slow that nobody would want to use it.

This is them confirming that the CPU has enough virtualization support that they can virtualize rather than emulate the guest OS

Yeah. It's the first production Mac using an A-chip and is a Mac that has had many things cut out for savings. The question is did Apple feature cut required functionality.

The first Apple Silicon developer boxes were Mac Minis with A series chips so I wouldn’t have expected any issues.

The A12Z in the developer transition kit didn't support hardware virtualization.

That's why I chose to specifically mention production. The developer boxes were to get macOS native stuff going but virtualization was not a priority.

But they also had iPad chips, not iPhone.