Live data from Hacker News

Parallels confirms MacBook Neo can run Windows in a virtual machine

macrumors.com

281–290 of 473 posts

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

#281

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.

I don't know. Both of my macs are over 7 years old, and have at least 32GB of RAM. Certainly would not buy an 8GB one now.

Even if your only use case is using Chrome?

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

#282

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That was all x86_64, but even if aarch64 is more memory efficient, it can’t be too drastic, and 8GiB was borderline unusable even 10 years ago. Nowadays it must be a teeth-grinding tight fit for a browser and couple Electron apps, held together on a prayer next website doesn’t go too crazy with the bells and whistles and wasn’t vibeslopped with utter disregard to any big-Os.

> even if aarch64 is more memory efficient, it can’t be too drastic Why not? All the other advantages of M processors (performance, battery life) have absolutely been drastic

Yeah. Also the bandwidth of modern soldered-on Mac SSDs is insane compared to where it was in the Intel era. The performance impact of moving applications in and out of swap should be much lower than it was a few years ago.

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

#283

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Apple have historically moved forward minimum requirements for macOS and apps a bit aggressively. They need to slow that down now if they want us to take the macbook neo seriously.

Good. So many software developers have gotten so lazy with RAM usage in the past few decades. I hope the Neo is a kick in the pants to get everyone in the Apple ecosystem to take memory usage seriously.

More efficient software benefits everyone.

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

#284

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I just tried to open the context menu in Windows Explorer. It showed up almost as soon as I released the mouse button, and I have a much slower CPU, older video card, and way less RAM then you do. I was also running 12 windows of Firefox with collectively 1000+ tabs (though only about 36 or loaded), Steam, a Unity game, and Microsoft Teams, plus a number of background programs. If your Explorer context menu is taking…

Other than hardware it could also be some third-party software hooking into Explorer to do who knows what.

Microsoft is responsible for the UX of the ecosystem they create. Things that extend the OS are part of that responsibility. It shouldn't be possible for such a thing to happen. The OS could just show the damn menu after 500ms even if some extension hasn't responded.

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

#285

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.

Except you have to run Tahoe

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

#286
post #225

Earlier quoted context omitted.

With old style DIMMs I can understand this excuse, with LPCAMM though, it doesn't fly.

Yes it does. LPCAMM path is still dozens of millimeters. Soldered on is one mm or less.

Yep. Even the framework seems to be moving to soldered on ram.

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

#287
post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The reason every developer makes their app open at startup, is because the Windows ecosystem doesn't have a good package manager. So every app needs to be its own package manager and check for updates on a timer. So they need to run all the time so they can run that timer.

In theory the Windows Store will handle updates. In practice, I avoid the Windows Store version of applications. Also, you can't turn off app updating, only pause them for a time.

Windows Store could be great but it sucks. I haven't looked into winget yet but hopefully that takes off and doesn't suck.

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

#288

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…

> This isn't a novelty it will crush the low end of the PC market. You took what I said out of context and then replied to something else . Running Parallels on a Neo is a novelty. Parallels is both what the thread is about AND what my reply was expressly about. Nobody can reasonably read what I wrote, in context, and believe I was referring to the computer itself as a novelty.

[deleted]

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

#289

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.

Apple is going to cannibalize their own laptop market.

They are just covering all the market segments. This is for people who didn't want to shell out $1000 for a laptop for their kid, or have another one just to browse the web. Or they have an iphone but not a mac laptop, but now they might want one cause it's even cheaper than a phone. This will be pushed into schools probably as well.

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

#290
post #258

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…

> Over 900 billion people in the world play PC games on windows, for example.

"As of 2026, the world population is approximately 8.3 billion." [1]

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_population

Post reply on HN