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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

#441

Post by kristianp »

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 wonder how long before Apple has to raise the price of them due to RAM and nand flash shortages? Especially at the $499 price with student discount.

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

#442

Post by AnthonyMouse »

spacedcowboy wrote: post #436
AnthonyMouse wrote: post #434

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Most people using these things aren't going to be using more than 8GB on an ongoing basis, and if they do, they'll not be swapping it like mad as you suggest, because it's only on application-switch that it will matter. To begin with, a single application can pretty easily use more than 8GB by itself these days. But suppose you are using multiple applications at once. If one of them actually has a large working set…

Yeah dude, "Rendering, AI, code compiling,..." is not the target market for this device. It's just not. > 2GB/s is 8200GB/hour is 172.8TB/day. It's the worst case scenario if you max out the drive. Right, which is completely and utterly unrealistic. As I said, I want what you're smoking. I have an 8GB M1 mini lying around somewhere (I just moved country) which was my kids computer for several years before he got an M…

> Yeah dude, "Rendering, AI, code compiling,..." is not the target market for this device. It's just not.

None of the people who want to do those things but can't afford a more expensive machine will ever attempt to do them on the machine they can actually afford then, is that right?

> Right, which is completely and utterly unrealistic.

"Unrealistic" is something that doesn't happen. This is something that happens if you use that machine in a particular way, and there are many people who use machines in that way.

> He had the sort of load that would be more typical - web-browsing, playing games, writing the occasional thing in Pages, streaming video, etc. etc.

Then you would have a sample size of one determined by all kinds of arbitrary factors like whether any of the games had a large enough working set to make it swap, how many hours were spent playing that game instead of another one etc.

The problem is not that it always happens. The problem is that it can happen, and then they needlessly screw you by soldering the drive.

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

#443

Post by josephg »

p_ing wrote: post #424
josephg wrote: post #283

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> So many software developers have gotten so lazy with RAM usage in the past few decades. Fewer developers want to write ASM or C, today. Slower to market, slower to roll out features, etc. While that may seem like a good thing, and probably could be, the market doesn't like it. Developer choose heavy weight frameworks or don't make use of modern features in said frameworks to improve performance. And in some cases,…

You don't need to program in ASM or C to write a memory efficient program. Swift, Go, Rust, C++ and C# are all reasonably memory efficient at the scales we're talking about.

Usually you just have to actually look at memory usage and trim the obvious fat. But so many developers these days treat memory as an infinite resource, and don't have a clue how to use profiling tools to even investigate memory usage. That and, maybe stop shipping a copy of Chrome with your application.

I'm hopeful that LLMs will improve the state of application development. Claude can write sloppy code, but it also knows how to write rust and swift, and it knows a lot of tricks for optimisation if you prompt it.

There's 3rd party libraries which know how to interact with spotify. I wonder how many claude code tokens it would take to make a simple, native spotify client. Or discord client. Or client for Teams or Slack.

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

#444

Post by Gigachad »

p_ing wrote: post #429
Gigachad wrote: post #227

Earlier quoted context omitted.

macOS is significantly better built than Windows.

The kernel is technically inferior to NT, especially with memory management (see OOM on macOS while NT will keep going).

The kernel isn't that relevant compared to all the absolute garbage layered on top. The most efficient kernel is pointless when you have copilot and a UI built in React sucking down all your system resources.

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

#445

Post by amluto »

kstrauser wrote: post #170
asimovDev wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Is there some reasonable way to check whether the Fusion drive is failing? Some quick searches suggest that Apple’s built in tooling doesn’t actually help much.

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

#446

Post by filleduchaos »

dangus wrote: post #410
jen20 wrote: post #290

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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

And only 100 million people globally use Macs as of 2024. The PC gaming market alone is 9x larger than the Mac's install base. https://www.spyhunter.com/shm/macos-stats/ That means a LOT of students who the MacBook Neo appeals to will cross it off their list for the mere fact that they can’t play things like Counter Strike 2/CS:Go on it. If I was a student today and only had $700 budget for all my equipment I’d proba…

I'm not sure how you missed that the user you were responding to was poking a little bit of fun at you claiming that "over 900 BILLION" people play games on Windows.

That aside, it is also a bit funny that the Hacker News crowd's grand indictment of Mac gaming always uses the same examples of first person shooters that gained ascendancy when they were young. Meanwhile a teenager in 2026 is more likely to be upset that they can't play Fortnite on it - and that's besides the fact that many of the games that today's teenagers are excited to play (from Roblox to the Hollow Knight series to Baldur's Gate 3 to the recently released Slay the Spire 2 and more) are available on macOS. But one wouldn't know that from listening to people whose impression of both gaming and Macs is stuck firmly in ~2015.

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

#447

Post by timbit42 »

raw_anon_1111 wrote: post #146
bitwize wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

That's false. The Amiga could run the Mac OS better than any Mac could, even with the same CPU because of the Amiga custom chips. Also, Amigas had faster CPUs available than the Macs did, and the Amiga OS was still multitasking in the background.

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

#448

Post by raw_anon_1111 »

timbit42 wrote: post #447
raw_anon_1111 wrote: post #146

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

That's false. The Amiga could run the Mac OS better than any Mac could, even with the same CPU because of the Amiga custom chips. Also, Amigas had faster CPUs available than the Macs did, and the Amiga OS was still multitasking in the background.

I was around for all of Jim Drew’s lies.

And the Amigas interlace graphics were piss poor

Amigas were stuck on 68K chips and used a slower bus after Macs had moved on to the PPC.

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

#449

Post by kstrauser »

amluto wrote: post #445
kstrauser wrote: post #170

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Is there some reasonable way to check whether the Fusion drive is failing? Some quick searches suggest that Apple’s built in tooling doesn’t actually help much.

Sorry, I don't remember the details and it was several years ago. I do remember looking at the Console log and seeing lots of drive timeouts.
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