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Parallels confirms MacBook Neo can run Windows in a virtual machine

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

#161

Post by wolrah »

bitwize wrote: post #119
hn_acc1 wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

HDD or SSD? SSD can effectively make up for SOME amount of less RAM due to faster swapping, in my experience.

2015 laptop, spinning rust. Nevertheless, it was at least somewhat acceptable at purchase, but crapware installed with successive system updates brought it to a standstill. An SSD might've helped, but not by much. I wiped it and put Kubuntu on it to give to my wife, for whom it ran acceptably. She gave it back when she got a shiny new MacBook Air.

> An SSD might've helped, but not by much.

A SSD would have made an absolutely massive difference.

Source: I have clients that still have 2nd/3rd gen i5 systems running 3-4 GB of RAM with Windows 10 and they're tolerable solely thanks to SSDs. Swapping that much on a hard drive would just be painful to use.

Nobody should be interactively using a computer post-2018ish (whenever SSDs fell below $1/GB) that's booting and running primary applications off spinning rust. They're perfectly fine for bulk storage drives but anyone waiting for an operating system booting off one has wasted enough of their life in the last year to have paid for the SSD. Companies that wouldn't spend $100 on an upgrade are literally throwing money away paying their employees to wait on a shit computer.

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

#162

Post by sroussey »

dragonwriter wrote: post #144
gamblor956 wrote: post #78

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.

> 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.)

I went looking, and did find stuff on Amazon, though none were made of an aluminum chasis, and none had the geekbench score anywhere near, and none had the screen brightness.

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

#163

Post by mountainriver »

ActorNightly wrote: post #138
roody15 wrote: post #131

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.

MacBooks are a far superior product, not just a status symbol

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

#164

Post by assaddayinh »

gigatexal wrote: post #143
ActorNightly wrote: post #138

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

[dead]

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

#165

Post by SpecialistK »

ASalazarMX wrote: post #74
Aurornis wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Every thread about Windows on Hacker News includes claims about apps taking 30 seconds to launch, web pages taking 20 seconds to load, simple applications being unusable, and other extreme performance problems. These are puzzling for anyone (like me) who uses Windows at home without all of these extreme performance problems. That was until I realized how many reports are coming from people talking about their work la…

I like videogames, maybe more than I should at my age, and I prefer to play them from Steam in Linux through Proton. A couple of months ago I caved in and bought a proper Windows gaming miniPC because a game I want is not stable in Proton. I use a corporate Windows VDI at work, so the experience is understandably subpar there, but it is still horrible on high.end hardware. Took me half a day just to herd it through u…

Because Windows isn't really an OS anymore, but a "platform" to deliver advertisements and lock you into Microsoft services. The OS core itself is fairly solid (and has been since Vista/7) but it's all of the crud shoved on top which really ruins everything.

The LTSC IoT releases are easy to find (wink-wink) and don't have 80% of the annoyances, including constant "feature upgrades" - still not Linux, but better than consumer Windows.

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

#166

Post by wtallis »

gruez wrote: post #24
joe_mamba wrote: post #5

Man, I do wonder what the realistic lifespan of that single NAND chip will be after it gets hammered by constant swapping of running tasks way beyond the capabilities of a 8GB RAM machine. I have a PC with a 10+ year old 256GB SATA Samsung SSD that's still in top shape, but that's different because that drive has those 256GB split over several NAND chips inside, so wear is spread out and shuffled around by the contro…

>but that's different because that drive has those 256GB split over several NAND chips inside, so wear is spread out and shuffled around by the controller to extend lifespan. But when your entire wearable storage is a single soldered chip, I'm not very optimistic about long term reliability. I thought wear leveling worked at the page/block level, not the chip level? On an SSD, if there was a failure of an entire chip…

You're correct, GP's understanding of how wear leveling works is off by several layers. Counting the number of BGA packages tells you nothing. There are multiple NAND dies per package, multiple planes per die, many blocks per plane, and the size of each erase block is the largest-scale feature that is relevant to wear leveling.

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

#167

Post by incanus77 »

ActorNightly wrote: post #138
roody15 wrote: post #131

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.

What school IT director does this?

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

#169

Post by dwedge »

Retr0id wrote: post #94
alwillis wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Like any other Apple Silicon Mac, you can't currently boot into Linux but Apple has native container support that Linux works on [1]. [1]: https://github.com/apple/container

I'm writing this from Linux running natively (not virtualized) on an Apple Silicon mac (M1 Pro)

How does it function? Last time I tried was a 2018 Intel MBP and it was a gamble where I would always lose either WiFi (despite the driver being in the installer iso) or the keyboard. I'm aware it's a totally different architecture, but I also seem to remember comments about that one too before I tried.

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

#170

Post by kstrauser »

asimovDev wrote: post #51
amluto wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’ve helped someone with a rather clean iMac, circa 2019, still supported by Apple. Forget 6 minutes — you can spend a full hour from boot to giving up trying to get anything done. I think that Apple has gotten so used to having fast storage in their machines that the newer OSes basically don’t work on spinning rust.

these iMacs have horrible Fusion drives (128GB SSD + 1TB HDD combo) iirc that fail often. Have you looked into that?

I bet this is it. I had a 2018 Mac Mini with a failing drive that moved like frozen molasses, but wasn't throwing obvious errors. Before it failed, it was slow compared to an SSD, but booted up in a reasonable amount of time and ran office apps just fine, just with a little startup lag. It was bad compared to an SDD, but not intolerably slow.

If a Mac is running that slowly, there's probably a hardware issue.

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