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Parallels confirms MacBook Neo can run Windows in a virtual machine

macrumors.com

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

#271

Post by smallerize »

pxmpxm wrote: post #269
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.

My 13 year old mac desktop is sitting here with 14.82gb used with nothing but messages and firefox. Really dount that 8gb will cut it.

Browsers use available RAM for cache, but they don't require that much. Firefox officially supports running on Macs down to 512MB of RAM. It will just be slower.

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

#272

Post by yunnpp »

pxmpxm wrote: post #269
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.

My 13 year old mac desktop is sitting here with 14.82gb used with nothing but messages and firefox. Really dount that 8gb will cut it.

This is really not the right comparison to make. An OS will use memory liberally. Give it more and it'll use more. Give it less and it'll swap to disk. So the real question is how long a given workload takes to complete, or whether you can multi-task without shitting out to/from disk every time you switch windows. "My OS uses X amount of RAM" is an entirely meaningless and irrelevant statement.

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

#273

Post by ewoodrich »

dangus wrote: post #258
thelastgallon wrote: post #249

Apple is moving into Google's territory, cheap Chromebooks. The right move for Google is to aggressively move forward with their desktop OS and launch their line of laptops. The first pixel laptops had the best keyboards and trackpads ever. Google can nail this if they have the right product person. Apple needs some competition and the legacy PC makers won't cut it. Once again, it has to be Apple vs Google, same as A…

I think this is somewhat ignorant the wide variety of legitimately very decent Windows PC laptops available in the exact same $500-700 price range as the MacBook Neo. Apple isn’t disrupting the industry here. Don’t buy into early influencer review hype. These reviewers don’t actually look at retail store pricing. Apple is just making a decision to go downmarket and making many of the same compromises as other cheap l…

Damn, an OLED screen at my go-to 14" screen size, and I can actually run Fedora on it? Going to have to do some more research on this thing...

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

#274

Post by dangus »

ewoodrich wrote: post #273
dangus wrote: post #258

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think this is somewhat ignorant the wide variety of legitimately very decent Windows PC laptops available in the exact same $500-700 price range as the MacBook Neo. Apple isn’t disrupting the industry here. Don’t buy into early influencer review hype. These reviewers don’t actually look at retail store pricing. Apple is just making a decision to go downmarket and making many of the same compromises as other cheap l…

Damn, an OLED screen at my go-to 14" screen size, and I can actually run Fedora on it? Going to have to do some more research on this thing...

In case you need it, this is the next model up with the 350 processor. If you care about graphics performance it has double the cores, and the bigger SSD as I mentioned:

https://www.bestbuy.com/product/lenovo-yoga-7-2-in-1-copilot...

Review: https://youtube.com/watch?v=3ZTe5kUYt9k

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

#275

Post by yunnpp »

alwillis wrote: post #241
auggierose wrote: post #239

Earlier quoted context omitted.

8GB of RAM. Not 16GB. And oh yes, the modern Mac shares those 8GB with the video RAM...

> And oh yes, the modern Mac shares those 8GB with the video RAM... The Unified Memory Architecture is why these Macs are so fast—no wasted cycles moving data between RAM and GPU. And the data is compressed in real-time so less data has to be transferred and there's less ware and tear on the SSD, which is directly to SoC [1]. [1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47354705

UMAs aren't made for speed, but for power savings. You are ignoring the fact that a discrete GPU accesses VRAM and caches at much higher bandwidths (and power) than an iGPU does RAM. Shared mem also comes at the cost of keeping it coherent between CPU/GPU. So you can't just look at one part of the system and then claim that UMAs must be faster because there are no data transfers.

And by the way, even on UMAs, the iGPU can still have a dedicated segment of memory not readable by the CPU. Therefore UMA does not imply there won't be data transfers.

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

#276

Post by icwtyjj »

everdrive wrote: post #56
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…

There's an unspoken rule in corporate America, colleges, etc. Laptops MUST be loaded down with terrible software, no exceptions. My last corporate laptop actually had the paid version of winzip in 2025, and it ran with a little tray icon that I couldn't disable or remove. That was in addition to all the other corporate crap I couldn't remove. Some of this is not _just_ a corporate problem. Why would Winzip have an au…

I think there’s a pretty big difference though. Linux is open while windows almost certainly will remain closed so even if corporates start bloating up Linux users can rely on the gpl to give them choice while windows users are stuck

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

#277

Post by lovich »

wolpoli wrote: post #191
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.

PC makers are going to stop some of the artificial segmentation they used on the lower price devices, and that is going to hurt the sales of their higher-end lines. There is no reason they kept pushing 70 percent srgb panels on even the mid tier Thinkpads when the Neo has a good display.

That sounds great and like capitalism is working for once in terms of increased competition causes companies to produce more for less

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

#278

Post by saithound »

lubujackson wrote: post #230
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.

This is Apple's "Nintendo moment" when they realize they can package old hardware and win on polish and ecosystem.

They already had that exact strategy between 2012 and 2020.

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

#279

Post by jml7c5 »

Gigachad wrote: post #227
mrichman wrote: post #221

How is this even usable with 8GB RAM?

macOS is significantly better built than Windows.

People keep claiming this, but my experience is that it's pretty similar. My mom's PC accidentally had only 4GB of RAM for the past 5 years (whoops), and we only noticed it a month ago because the cheap SSD was finally dying due to heavy swapping.
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