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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

#411

Post by [deleted] »

auggierose wrote: post #398
cj wrote: post #395

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not a great look when you need to put other people down as a way to defend your viewpoint. > Well, I am just saying it is not for me, and neither for anyone else who is not a newbie Objectively, no, that's not what you're saying if you read the 2nd part of your sentence.

I don't think I am the one trying to put anyone down here. Just telling you how it is. I stand by every word. I mean, I wouldn't exchange my 7 year (!) old laptop for this. It seems also to be Apple's opinion (Macbook Newbie, I mean Macbook Neo).

[deleted]

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

#412

Post by tim333 »

amelius wrote: post #193
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.

Apple is going to cannibalize their own laptop market.

I had a look at one in the Apple Store and think I'll probably stick with the Air for my next laptop. The Neo is cool and that but looks quite cheap and cheerful alongside the Airs.

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

#413

Post by tim333 »

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.

I've been using the 8GB M1 Air for years and had very few issues.

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

#414

Post by thelastgallon »

materielle wrote: post #252
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…

What’s actually going to happen is the second they start to lose market share or struggle at all, they will cancel everything Chromebook related and give up. With that said, I think Chromebook’s still hold a competitive advantage for public school contracts. It doesn’t matter that the Neo is pretty cheap and the best value. Contracts are signed based on what’s cheapest, period. Also, a big blind spot for a lot of HN:…

You are probably right. Just saw the news about Google Fiber being sold. What a shame!

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

#415

Post by bzzzt »

AnthonyMouse wrote: post #339
pants2 wrote: post #300

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You might be surprised, with NVMe swap 8GB is surprisingly capable. ~1.6GB/s Read/Write.

Flash has finite write endurance. NVMe swap can burn through it pretty quick. Which is isn't that bad because if it wears out you can replace it... unless the drive is soldered.

Most flash memory will happily accept writes long after passing the TBW 'limit'. If write endurance would be that much of a problem I'd expect the second hand market to be saturated with 8Gb M1 MacBooks with dead SSDs by now. Since that's obviously not the case I think it's not that bad.

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

#416

Post by GeekyBear »

avidphantasm wrote: post #394
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.

I think the major reason for the aggressive price point of the Neo, and for not raising RAM and SSD upgrade prices in the MBP much, is that Apple is willing to give up some hardware margin to have more devices to sell services to. Unless I am mistaken, services have been key to Apple’s recent revenue growth. This isn’t a bad thing at this point, but could auger poorly if they foolishly chase recurring revenue at the…

> Apple is willing to give up some hardware margin

Did they give up a large chunk of margin, or have they been able to offset some of the higher costs of commodity chips by replacing high margin components with their own in house designs?

Designing and manufacturing your own components (CPU/GPU, Cellular modem, WiFi/Bluetooth, etc.) isn't free, but it's cheaper than paying someone else a markup at Apple's scale.

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

#417

Post by derefr »

commandersaki wrote: post #357
jsiepkes wrote: post #351

Earlier quoted context omitted.

While the Neo is a nice notebook, I think you are overestimating it's durability advantages. > If you're a school IT department buying these in volume, you want something that actually lasts more than a year before pieces of plastic begin chipping off, hinges start wearing out, etc. And you want something that's easy to clean / sanitize sticky little kid fingerprints off of, and also to undo e.g. residue (from kids w…

This guy [1] that posted about his series of plastic laptops over the years is a telling indictment of what the PC/chromebook value range is about. Hinges easily damage, bits and pieces falling off, can't go from closed to open with one finger, etc. In my region in Australia schools require parents to buy a laptop and the choice is between PC and Mac (Chromebook not allowed); before the Neo getting a Mac would be a b…

Yep. Anyone saying a MacBook of any kind is comparable to the average school Chromebook has clearly never touched a school Chromebook anywhere other than in a Best Buy.

$200 — or even $500 — plastic computers are different in kind (of parts and materials used) to $800+ computers. It's not anything you'd notice when the hardware is new — not the extreme "deck flex" or anything like that — but it becomes clear after 3–6 months of even light use.

Planned obsolescence is real. But, rather than being a result of malicious adulteration, it is the predictable result of aiming for an MSRP (and therefore COGS) where the only viable parts and materials the OEM can get their hands on to meet that price point, have engineering tolerances far below the use-case they’re applying them to. The makers of $500 Chromebooks know they'll break well before buyers expect them to. But with their middling purchasing power and economies of scale, this is the best they can do.

Apple, meanwhile, can hit the same MSRP not by cheaping out on parts, but rather through economies of scale and manufacturing consolidation. Obviously the A18. But also: buy enough high-quality aluminum in bulk, and stamp the same modular chassis parts out for every laptop you make — and those parts start to get cheap enough to use even in a $500 product.

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

#418

Post by AnthonyMouse »

spacedcowboy wrote: post #386
AnthonyMouse wrote: post #339

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Flash has finite write endurance. NVMe swap can burn through it pretty quick. Which is isn't that bad because if it wears out you can replace it... unless the drive is soldered.

Mac SSDs are expected to last 8-10 years, even with high use. though Apple don't publish these values specifically, it's possible to start to extrapolate from the SMART data when it starts showing errors. A good SSD ought to be able to cope with ~600TBW. My ~4.5-year-old MBP gives the following: smartctl --all /dev/disk0 ... Data Units Read: 1,134,526,088 [580.8 TB] Data Units Written: 154,244,108 [78.7 TB] ... Media…

> I'm sure an 8GB RAM machine would use more swap than my 16GB one, but probably not much more

It's non-linear. If you have a 17GB working set size, a 16GB machine is actively using 1GB of swap, but the 8GB machine is using 9GB. If you have a 14GB working set size, the 16GB machine doesn't need to thrash at all, but the 8GB machine is still doing 6GB.

Meanwhile "SSDs are fast" is the thing that screws you here. Once your actual working set (not just some data in memory the OS can swap out once and leave in swap) exceeds the size of physical memory, the machine has to swap it in and back out continuously. Which you might not notice when the SSD is fast and silent, but now the fact that the SSD will write at 2GB/sec means you can burn through that entire 600TBW in just over three days, and faster drives are even worse.

On top of that, the write endurance is proportional to the size of the drive. 600TBW is pretty typical for the better consumer 1TB drives, but a smaller drive gets proportionally less. And then the machines with less RAM are typically also paired with smaller drives.

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

#419

Post by Rohansi »

simulator5g wrote: post #284
Rohansi wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

The extensions are native code loaded directly into the Explorer process and called from the UI thread. There is no async option they can time out.

It's not the recommended way to hook into the context menu. They have had declarative options for a long time which do not cause issues like this.

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

#420

Post by AnthonyMouse »

bzzzt wrote: post #415
AnthonyMouse wrote: post #339

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Flash has finite write endurance. NVMe swap can burn through it pretty quick. Which is isn't that bad because if it wears out you can replace it... unless the drive is soldered.

Most flash memory will happily accept writes long after passing the TBW 'limit'. If write endurance would be that much of a problem I'd expect the second hand market to be saturated with 8Gb M1 MacBooks with dead SSDs by now. Since that's obviously not the case I think it's not that bad.

> Most flash memory will happily accept writes long after passing the TBW 'limit'.

That's the problem, isn't it? It does the write, it will read back fine right now, but the flash is worn out and then when you try to read back the data in six months, it's corrupt.

> If write endurance would be that much of a problem I'd expect the second hand market to be saturated with 8Gb M1 MacBooks with dead SSDs by now.

That's assuming it's sufficiently obvious to the typical buyer. You buy the machine with a fresh OS install and only newly written data, everything seems fine. Your 30 day warranty/return period expires, still fine. Then it starts acting weird.

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