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Parallels confirms MacBook Neo can run Windows in a virtual machine

macrumors.com

141–150 of 473 posts

Re: Parallels confirms MacBook Neo can run Windows in a virtual machine

#141

I’m excited that Apple now has a reason to keep MacOS small. Their soon to be top-selling machine has 8GB and they won’t want to make all those millions of Neos unusable by shipping a bloated OS.

I wrote about how Unified Memory, SSD directly attached to the SoC and Apple's use of real-time compression saves memory, reduces power consumption and wear on SSDs [1]. [1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47354705

In practice I think this is going to be very specific to your data being good for compression and not already compressed - so not gaming, where textures can fill up the Neo's 8GB very fast depending on the game: Cyberpunk, Robocop, Bioshock and Shadow of the Tomb Raider benchmarks are showing 9 - 10 GB of RAM used at just 720p.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uOe-Ock4pnw

Re: Parallels confirms MacBook Neo can run Windows in a virtual machine

#142

MacBook Neo is going to sell like crazy. In the education market, educators, students, aides... nothing close at this price point. With memory and SSD prices so high I don't see how Dell, Asus and others are going to be able to compete. Unless the build quality is significantly worse than a M1 macbook air not sure budget PC makers will be able to compete.

ITs going to sell like crazy not because of specs, but because its apple, and its a cheap. Cause god forbid you pull out a chromebook in a starbucks and be seen as a peasant. If you know what you are doing and don't want to spend a lot of money, its really not that hard to buy a refurbished thinkpad, swap in more ram, and install your linux disro of choice, for a lower price and get very similar usable performance.

And run what on the Chromebook exactly?

Re: Parallels confirms MacBook Neo can run Windows in a virtual machine

#143

MacBook Neo is going to sell like crazy. In the education market, educators, students, aides... nothing close at this price point. With memory and SSD prices so high I don't see how Dell, Asus and others are going to be able to compete. Unless the build quality is significantly worse than a M1 macbook air not sure budget PC makers will be able to compete.

ITs going to sell like crazy not because of specs, but because its apple, and its a cheap. Cause god forbid you pull out a chromebook in a starbucks and be seen as a peasant. If you know what you are doing and don't want to spend a lot of money, its really not that hard to buy a refurbished thinkpad, swap in more ram, and install your linux disro of choice, for a lower price and get very similar usable performance.

The Chromebook would be slow and run worse software. So… but also yeah nobody wants to look like a peasant.

Re: Parallels confirms MacBook Neo can run Windows in a virtual machine

#144

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This isn't a novelty it will crush the low end of the PC market. No one cares if the next iteration will be better with 12GB of ram. The workloads that people say that 8GB can't handle will be ones that the actual users will either wait or tolerate. I've been noticing that people who review the Macbook Neo basically don't get the point [1] and just the headline of this article matters that VMs work and thats a big wi…

Most people run Windows just fine on cheap laptops with 4GB of RAM. These won't run Crysis, but they don't need to.

> Most people run Windows just fine on cheap laptops with 4GB of RAM.

And if they can do that, they can get them (at full MSRP) for about half the price of a MacBook Neo.

Heck, you can get 8GB Windows laptops with twice the SSD size of the MacBook Neo's for a little over half of the Neo’s price (again, at full MSRP.)

Re: Parallels confirms MacBook Neo can run Windows in a virtual machine

#145

Earlier quoted context omitted.

MacOS has always been incredibly bloated.

9.2.2 wasn't

As long as you ignore that whole part of the OS was still running 68K code on PPC Macs, it crashed like a drunk driving a semi truck without protected memory and the end user still had to fiddle with the amount of memory an app could use

Re: Parallels confirms MacBook Neo can run Windows in a virtual machine

#146
post #88

Nice! The best Windows laptop you can buy is still a MacBook.

Kinda like how back in the day, the best Mac you could buy was an Amiga. :)

I was around and in the comp.sys.amiga.advocacy wars. That was always a load of BS.

Re: Parallels confirms MacBook Neo can run Windows in a virtual machine

#147

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>There was quite a bit of discussion about that when the M1 first came out, but none of it really seemed to have happened six years later. 1. How do you know nothing happened? Define nothing in this case. Do Mac users check and report their SSD wear anywhere? 2. Didn't the OG 256gb M1 have 2 128MB NAND chips instead of one 256 meaning better wear resistance?

If swapping was causing SSDs to fail on M1 Macs, we would never see the end of the hysterical articles about "NANDgate". Since we haven't seen any in all these years, it's seems pretty certain it's not happening.

Exactly. If some sort of random Dell model has a failure, you'll never hear about it because there's only a few thousand or so in circulation. But if any Apple product which sells in the tens/hundreds of millions has an issue, you'll hear about it whether you want to or not.

Re: Parallels confirms MacBook Neo can run Windows in a virtual machine

#149

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The cpu in Neo is 2-3 times faster.

My (former) corpo HP laptop with 16GB RAM had 75% RAM used at idle after a fresh boot with Outlook, Teams and all the copro shit running in the background. So the 8GB NEO CPU will spend its time swapping data from ram to disk versus the 16GB+ ones, given both being filled with corporate spyware and same heavy use cases. Also it isn't 2-3x faster, stop with the made up nonsense please. Just checked and my 3 year old A…

This is another myth that needs to die. You can’t just look at Task manager and see that the OS is using extra memory and assume anything else loaded will cause swapping. Thats not how modern OS work.

Re: Parallels confirms MacBook Neo can run Windows in a virtual machine

#150
post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Most people run Windows just fine on cheap laptops with 4GB of RAM. These won't run Crysis, but they don't need to.

Windows doesn't run "just fine" on 4 GiB of RAM. I had a laptop with 6; Windows 10 became barely usable. If you want to run one, small, program at a time I think you'll be ok. Forget about web browsing; you'll get one tab and it'll be slow.

A lightweight Linux desktop can keep a decent amount of browser tabs (using Firefox; avoid Chrome) on 4GB RAM if you set up compressed RAM properly. It's not foolproof like 8GB would be, but it's absolutely fine for casual use.
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