Live data from Hacker News

Parallels confirms MacBook Neo can run Windows in a virtual machine

macrumors.com

71–80 of 473 posts

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

#71
post #60

If Apple continues with the budget Neo brand into a 12 GB iteration, I can see this becoming more realistic (rather than a novelty). That being said, Parallels may need to review its licensing with a budget tier in mind. Few will buy a cheap computer and then pay what Parallels charges for a license (regardless if one-time or subscription). They need to introduce something below the Standard license targeting the Neo…

Apple already sells that, it’s called MacBook Air.

[deleted]

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

#72

If Apple continues with the budget Neo brand into a 12 GB iteration, I can see this becoming more realistic (rather than a novelty). That being said, Parallels may need to review its licensing with a budget tier in mind. Few will buy a cheap computer and then pay what Parallels charges for a license (regardless if one-time or subscription). They need to introduce something below the Standard license targeting the Neo…

VMWare Fusion is free, even if it is a pain in the butt to download. It also has GPU paravirtualization for Linux/Windows which is the only reason I use a proprietary VMM on macOS these days.

http://tart.run works great for running macOS (and Linux) VMs on macOS if you're technical. It's free for non-commercial uses too! (Don't think there's GPU acceleration tho).

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

#73

I’m excited that Apple now has a reason to keep MacOS small. Their soon to be top-selling machine has 8GB and they won’t want to make all those millions of Neos unusable by shipping a bloated OS.

MacOS has always been incredibly bloated.

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

#74
post #13

Funnily it probably runs Windows better than the typical corporate spyware burdened x86 laptop.

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…

I like videogames, maybe more than I should at my age, and I prefer to play them from Steam in Linux through Proton. A couple of months ago I caved in and bought a proper Windows gaming miniPC because a game I want is not stable in Proton.

I use a corporate Windows VDI at work, so the experience is understandably subpar there, but it is still horrible on high.end hardware. Took me half a day just to herd it through update after update, while avoiding linking it to a Microsoft account despite its protests.

It's literally used to run only Steam and Firefox, and it still sucks compared to the ease of install/management of Linux. Ubuntu LTS took me about an hour to set up dual boot, apply updates, install Steam, and every other software and tool I use daily.

Why is Windows 11 still so clunky in 2026? It doesn't feel like the flagship product that many bright minds have improved for three decades. Why are hobbyists and small companies outperforming Microsoft's OS management?

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

#75

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…

I once worked on a computer for the US Government that felt slow. I counted nine (9) directly competitive and redundant endpoint protection products on it. Not nine different/only somewhat overlapping pieces of software from companies that were competitors. Nine equivalent products . I guess defender made ten.

Ten protection layers! This is the reverse of the seven proxies meme.

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

#76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If the A18 Pro has the same ISA as the M-series chips then this may not be so straightforward. I am still hanging on to my 2020 Intel MBP for dear life because it is the only Apple device I own that allows me to run Ubuntu and Windows 11 on a VirtualBox VM.

Would you elaborate what you mean by saying Linux on an M-series chip isn't straightforward? That's not been my experience, I (and lots of other devs) use it every day, Apple supports Linux via [0], and provides the ability to use Rosetta 2 within VMs to run legacy x86 binaries? 0: https://github.com/apple/container

Clearly I'm not as knowledgable about this as I thought I was. I already have a Ubuntu x86 VM running on an Intel Mac (inside VirtualBox). Same with Windows 11. Can this tool allow me to run both VMs in an Apple Silicon device in a performant way? Last I checked VirtualBox on Apple Silicon only permits the running of ARM64 guests.

While I have a preference for VirtualBox I'd say I'm hypervisor agnostic. Really any way I can get this to work would be super intriguing to me.

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

#78

If Apple continues with the budget Neo brand into a 12 GB iteration, I can see this becoming more realistic (rather than a novelty). That being said, Parallels may need to review its licensing with a budget tier in mind. Few will buy a cheap computer and then pay what Parallels charges for a license (regardless if one-time or subscription). They need to introduce something below the Standard license targeting the Neo…

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.

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

#79
post #13

Funnily it probably runs Windows better than the typical corporate spyware burdened x86 laptop.

My corporate spyware laden Surface ARM runs Windows faster than the Macbook Neo, but unlike the Neo can survive a fall onto a concrete floor. (Ask how I know...)

My home laptop is even faster.

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

#80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If swapping was causing SSDs to fail on M1 Macs, we would never see the end of the hysterical articles about "NANDgate". Since we haven't seen any in all these years, it's seems pretty certain it's not happening.

Hysteria would be if all had an issue like the keyboard gate, but this isn't an issue, it's a design limitation for certain uses cases which not everyone has. Some users will wear out faster than others due to usage patterns. If their M1 dies after 6 years of heavy usage, do you think they'll investigate if it was the NAND that died and go online to tell the news, or will they chuck it and buy new one? NAND is still…

The reality is most 8GB M1 Macs are still working just fine 6 years later. Power users know they need more than 8GB of RAM and will buy a MacBook Air or Pro with 16GB+.

The MacBook neo is for students, grandparents, travel, etc.

Hell, even if it dies after 6 years it was still a better experience than using a $500-600 windows PC and the cost comes out to ~$8/month spread over 6 years.

Post reply on HN