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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

#451

Post by MrDrMcCoy »

mountainriver wrote: post #163
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.

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

Only if what you want to do fits neatly within the walled garden. I personally like my freedom to tinker, and get great performance, functionality, and stability with Linux.

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

#452

Post by MrDrMcCoy »

gamblor956 wrote: post #78
zitterbewegung wrote: post #65

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…

Most people run Windows just fine on cheap laptops with 4GB of RAM. These won't run Crysis, but they don't need to.

I recently helped a friend ditch Windows for Linux on an 8GB budget laptop he had. It had win11 on it which could barely function with nothing running, kept swapping like crazy to it's anemic eMMC "SSD". Windows can't really run reasonably with 4GB of RAM. It will only technically boot.

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

#453

Post by jnaina »

apple is basically a services company pretending to be a hardware company.

Its services business runs at roughly 75% gross margin, while hardware sits around 36 to 37%. That tells you where the real money is.

in many ways, all the Apple devices exist to feed the services engine. The hardware pulls people into the ecosystem, and the services generate the profits.

the Neo is probably a bit of a loss leader. Once you factor in manufacturing tooling capex, distribution, shipping, marketing, and all the other costs, Apple is likely not making much on the device itself. But every new Neo buyer who enters the Apple ecosystem will probably spend at least $50 or more on Apple services (icloud, music, movies, apps, etc) over time. (i have several friends who are buying neo as their personal content consumption device, abandoning their current ipads)

my estimate (which is why i'm still holding aapl): Services hits roughly $275-300B by FY2035, representing about 35-40% of Apple's total revenue (up from 26% today), with gross margins staying in the 74-76% range. At that point, Services alone would generate more gross profit than the entire company does today. that is where the real payoff comes from.

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

#454

Post by nottorp »

smallerize wrote: post #421
nottorp wrote: post #392

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Try opening a google spreadsheet in 512 Mb ram.

Interesting, what happens?

Whatever happens will take a while, since the one google docs spreadsheet that I keep open - which isn't complex - uses 399 Mb just for its own tab.

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

#455

Post by spacedcowboy »

AnthonyMouse wrote: post #442
spacedcowboy wrote: post #436

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> The problem is not that it always happens. The problem is that it can happen

Ah. So, FUD, then. Gotcha.

“This ridiculously unlikely scenario is something I’m going to hype up and complain about because I don’t like some aspects of this companies business model”.

600 TBW in 3 days. Pull the other one, it’s got bells on.

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

#456

Post by bzzzt »

AnthonyMouse wrote: post #420
bzzzt wrote: post #415

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> 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.

SSD firmware does patrol reads and periodically rewrites data blocks. It also does error correction. Cold storage is a known issue with any SSD, but I don't have any insight in how bad this problem is in reality. Of course it will wear out eventually, but so will the rest of the system components. There's nothing to be gained by making SSDs that last 30 years when the other components fail in 15.

> Then it starts acting weird.

Is that speculation or do you have any facts to back that up?

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

#457

Post by qalmakka »

superjan wrote: post #376
qalmakka wrote: post #349

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's a big difference between running native ARM software on ARM and emulating x86 to run Windows. If this Mac was x86, it could have probably run Windows much faster thanks to virtualization

On Apple silicon, Parallels can’t run x64 windows, it is using the ARM version of Windows. The x64 emulation is provided by Windows. Of course this is inefficient, but not everything is automatically 2x slower: any OS code you invoke is not running as x64 emulation, and IO and memory access is not penalized by the emulation (but certainly somewhat from virtualization). I was pleasantly surprised how fast you can run…

Yeah I wasn't aware that Microsoft allowed that nowadays. Still, it's not ideal anyway, because in my experience Windows apps that are compatible with ARM are 90% either FOSS or portable on other platforms anyway. You use Windows to use x86 apps; if you don't need x86 apps you are generally better not using Windows at all, and if you need them they'll probably run poorly on ARM due to multiple layers of emulation. Wine is still an option, though. They support Rosetta on Mac and FEX/Box64 on Linux, so they may lead to better performance than Parallels

> I was pleasantly surprised how fast you can run x64 windows apps

In general as long as you have a fast enough machine emulation isn't that bad. Apple was doing that already for 68k with PPC and most people didn't noticed due to how massively faster their first PPC computers were. Still, the issue is that here we're not really talking about a high-end CPU aren't we

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

#458

Post by bean469 »

philistine wrote: post #406
mylies43 wrote: post #182

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The RAM being soldered is a hit against repair ability, you can't expand it or if the ram has issues you can't replace it, you will just be forced to throw out the entire machine. What else is modular here anyways? Can I swap out the CPU, the screen, the keyboard, ports...anything?

Why are the Thinkpads getting 10/10 when the math coprocessor can’t be replaced and the N2 cache is inside the CPU as well? We culturally decide what parts can or cannot be replaced. Apple solders their RAM on the CPU for performance reasons. It’s coming to PCs at some point, if they ever decide to compete on performance ever again.

> Apple solders their RAM on the CPU for performance reasons. It’s coming to PCs at some point, if they ever decide to compete on performance ever again.

Are you assuming that the PCs do not compete with Macs for performance? People built Hackintoshes that are more powerful than the highest spec Mac Pro - and for cheaper, too

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

#459

Post by philistine »

bean469 wrote: post #458
philistine wrote: post #406

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why are the Thinkpads getting 10/10 when the math coprocessor can’t be replaced and the N2 cache is inside the CPU as well? We culturally decide what parts can or cannot be replaced. Apple solders their RAM on the CPU for performance reasons. It’s coming to PCs at some point, if they ever decide to compete on performance ever again.

> Apple solders their RAM on the CPU for performance reasons. It’s coming to PCs at some point, if they ever decide to compete on performance ever again. Are you assuming that the PCs do not compete with Macs for performance? People built Hackintoshes that are more powerful than the highest spec Mac Pro - and for cheaper, too

On laptops, which is something between 80-90% of the market for computers, you'd be hard pressed to find a laptop that's competitive with Apple. Can you find a laptop chip that's as good as the M5 Max? Or the M3 Max for that matter.

Laptop PCs are starting to lag behind Apple, just like the fastest Android phones have a hard time competing with three year old iPhones.

Of course on the desktop, you can just pump more power into a disappointing x86 chip to eke out better perf but that market is marginal and Apple basically ignores it. Laptops might not be a problem for you specifically but this situation, where a company has advantages but is inadequate for the needs of the market, is how so many chip manufacturers just disappeared in the 90s.

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

#460

Post by vbezhenar »

LoganDark wrote: post #97
vbezhenar wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

MacOS has always been incredibly bloated.

There's a difference between bloated and batteries included. From a development point of view, macOS has native system libraries for things no other platform seems to include native system libraries for. And by "native system libraries" I do not mean downloadable content, dynamic support or anything similar, even if they're first-party. Though having unremovable system apps for every one of Apple's services MAY count…

From operating system I want a very bare bones experience. I definitely don't want operating system to ship with browser, file manager, terminal emulator, PDF viewer or rich text editor. And I absolutely don't want operating system to ship with chess engine, AI thing and some weird disk search utility which never works but always eats my CPU.

You might argue that some tools like terminal emulator or text editor might be necessary to solve some basic OS issues, but these tools should be extremely simple, like notepad.exe (old one!) or cmd.exe.

Anything other should be distributed in application store or any other way but not as a part of base operating system.

Nor Windows not macOS suits me for that definition, at least their default distributions (I'm pretty sure that it's possible for Apple or Microsoft to build bare bones operating system distribution, but so far they didn't bother and I won't accept some unsupported third party modifications). Linux somewhat suits me, as I can build something with little effort. It'll still contain lots of stuff I have no idea about, but these tend to not show up loudly.

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