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Parallels confirms MacBook Neo can run Windows in a virtual machine
- donatj 8mo agoWas that in doubt?
- crazysim 8mo agoYeah. It's the first production Mac using an A-chip and is a Mac that has had many things cut out for savings. The question is did Apple feature cut required functionality.
- nsxwolf 8mo agoThe first Apple Silicon developer boxes were Mac Minis with A series chips so I wouldn’t have expected any issues.
- crazysim 8mo agoThat's why I chose to specifically mention production. The developer boxes were to get macOS native stuff going but virtualization was not a priority.
- bydo 8mo agoThe A12Z in the developer transition kit didn't support hardware virtualization.
- MBCook 8mo agoBut they also had iPad chips, not iPhone.
- xeromal 8mo agoIt uses the iphone processor (which I think still might be one of those Mchips?) so I think it was ok to be unsure.
- jayd16 8mo agoThe odds of it not running at all were low but the performance is the real factor for whether it can _practically_ run a windows VM.
- MBCook 8mo agoThe M line was derived from the A line in the phones, and the individual cores are generally the same (though not in the same year). Counts, accelerators, other stuff on package/die is custom. I think it was a fair question too. Even if things should be capable it was always possible the feature would be disabled in hardware or software somehow. And with iPhones never running VMs as far as I know, we didn’t know if it was capable at all.
- SpecialistK 8mo agoUTM seems to make VMs available on iOS (with App Store limitations) although I've only used it on Mac: https://docs.getutm.app/ https://docs.getutm.app/
- MBCook 8mo agoI thought it was emulating everything like QEMU, not using virtualization hardware like you normally would on a computer.
- SpecialistK 8mo agoYou might be right. QEMU doesn't always make clear when you're running emulated or virtualized.
- Aurornis 8mo agoVirtualization requires specific hardware support to be performant. There are ways to do complete software emulation of a virtual machine but it would be so slow that nobody would want to use it. This is them confirming that the CPU has enough virtualization support that they can virtualize rather than emulate the guest OS
- qaz_plm 8mo ago“Parallels Desktop runs on MacBook Neo in basic usability testing. The Parallels Engineering team has completed initial testing and confirmed that Parallels Desktop installs and virtual machines operate stably on MacBook Neo. Full validation and performance testing is ongoing, and additional compatibility statement will follow if required.”
- joe_mamba 8mo agoMan, I do wonder what the realistic lifespan of that single NAND chip will be after it gets hammered by constant swapping of running tasks way beyond the capabilities of a 8GB RAM machine. I have a PC with a 10+ year old 256GB SATA Samsung SSD that's still in top shape, but that's different because that drive has those 256GB split over several NAND chips inside, so wear is spread out and shuffled around by the controller to extend lifespan. But when your entire wearable storage is a single soldered chip, I'm not very optimistic about long term reliability.
- aruametello 8mo agofrom what i seen in "low end" ssds like the "120gb sata sandisk ones" under windows in heavy near constant pagging loads is that they exceed by quite a lot their manufacturer lifetime TBW before actually actually started producing actual filesystem errors. I can see this could be a weaker spot in the durability of this device, but certainly it still could take a few years of abuse before anything breaks. an outdated study (2015) but inline with the "low end ssds" i mentioned. https://techreport.com/review/the-ssd-endurance-experiment-theyre-all-dead/ https://techreport.com/review/the-ssd-endurance-experiment-t...
- havaloc 8mo agoThere was quite a bit of discussion about that when the M1 first came out, but none of it really seemed to have happened six years later. The target audience isn't in danger of wearing it out and the ones that will push the limits will grow tired of it and sell it in a year or two or move on to the Neo 2, which might have 12gb of ram due to the expected chip. I still think it's a great machine, but I think all these worries about NAND dying really haven't come to fruition, and probably won't. I have about a hundred plus of various SSD Macs in service and not one has failed in any circumstance aside from a couple of battery issues (never charged and sat in the box for 2 years, and never off the charger).
- joe_mamba 8mo ago>There was quite a bit of discussion about that when the M1 first came out, but none of it really seemed to have happened six years later. 1. How do you know nothing happened? Define nothing in this case. Do Mac users check and report their SSD wear anywhere? 2. Didn't the OG 256gb M1 have 2 128MB NAND chips instead of one 256 meaning better wear resistance?
- Tagbert 8mo agoNot surprising but good to hear. It seems that there really isn’t anything that runs on a new MackBook Air that you couldn’t run on a NEO. It might not be as fast for some things but it gets the job done.
- torben-friis 8mo agoIsn’t basically m1 air equivalent in specs? I’ve got that one and I’m yet to feel limited.
- xattt 8mo agoIt will have a longer support period than an M1 based on Apple’s history of device releases. This might also mean a longer support period for the 16-series phones than typical, similar to the 4S.
- abnercoimbre 8mo agoAlways excited to hear about fellow M1 users. I’m not limited in the slightest. 5-6 years strong now?
- bloudermilk 8mo agoI’ve been an M1 Air fan since I got mine in 2020 but recently things have become unusable. Playing 4K videos often drops frames, even at 30fps. And I can’t reliably run Notion’s transcription AI on Zoom calls, even though it’s not running locally. I’m going to do an OS reinstall soon to see if that helps, otherwise it will be time to upgrade…
- torben-friis 8mo agoYeah, honestly not even counting. The only reason I even consider moving is that I dislike Tahoe and I know eventually I won’t be able to stall the update; hardware wise it doesn’t even cross my mind. I have a current gen MacBook Pro for work configured with stupid amounts of ram and I feel no difference in terms of fluidity at all.
- 8mo ago
- the_real_cher 8mo agodoes that mean since this is the iPhone 16 cpu, by proxy the iPhone 16 can also run Windows in a virtual machine?
- bombcar 8mo agoMaybe/maybe not (we don't know how identical the A18 chip is to what shipped in the iPhone) - but it does determine that the virtualization stuff that was added to the M1 (in the era of the A14) has now moved over to the A series, at least enough to support macOS.
- the_real_cher 8mo agoThats pretty cool.
- MBCook 8mo agoSpeculation I’ve heard from Ben Thompson of Stratechery is this machine is, in part, a way to get value out of iPhone Pro chips that had defects. The Neo has a 5 core GPU. The iPhone 16 Pro had a 6 core. So, if he’s correct, these are the same exact chip. Just with a fault in one GPU core or one GPU core disabled if it was good. That lets them use extra chips they already made that would have gone to waste, at least until they run out. Which would mean they both would have identical abilities, assuming no software lock for segmentation purposes. It’s all supposition. But it make a lot of business sense.
- the_real_cher 8mo agoWhat a cool and smart way to utilize those chips! It would explain why they picked such an arbitrary number of cores.
- hard_times 8mo agoIs this a trick question? Of course. However Apple imposed artificial limitations, like disabling JIT.
- j45 8mo agoIf Parallels can run it, UTM likely can run a fair bit too.
- bfrog 8mo agoFunnily it probably runs Windows better than the typical corporate spyware burdened x86 laptop.
- nazgulsenpai 8mo agoTook 6 minutes from power button to login prompt this morning. Probably even longer from login responsive desktop. So yes, probably!
- amluto 8mo agoI’ve helped someone with a rather clean iMac, circa 2019, still supported by Apple. Forget 6 minutes — you can spend a full hour from boot to giving up trying to get anything done. I think that Apple has gotten so used to having fast storage in their machines that the newer OSes basically don’t work on spinning rust.
- asimovDev 8mo agothese iMacs have horrible Fusion drives (128GB SSD + 1TB HDD combo) iirc that fail often. Have you looked into that?
- kstrauser 8mo agoI 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.
- amluto 8mo agoIs 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.
- enopod_ 8mo agoCan it run Linux?
- jagged-chisel 8mo agoIn a VM, definitely. Just like other Macs.
- stuxnet79 8mo agoIf 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.
- Retr0id 8mo agoAs long as you're ok with arm64 guests, you can absolutely run both Ubuntu and Win11 VMs on M-series CPUs. Parallels also supports x86 guests via emulation.
- stuxnet79 8mo agoHow is the performance when emulating the x86 architecture via parallels? Also is it possible to convert an existing x86 VM to arm64 or do I just have to rebuild all of my software from scratch? I always had the perception that the arm64 versions of Windows & Ubuntu have inferior support both in terms of userland software and device drivers.
- alwillis 8mo ago> As long as you're ok with arm64 guests I've run amd64 guests on M-series CPUs using Quem. Apple's Rosetta 2 is still a thing [1] for now. [1]: https://support.apple.com/en-us/102527 https://support.apple.com/en-us/102527 [2]: https://mac.getutm.app https://mac.getutm.app
- garblegarble 8mo agoWould 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 https://github.com/apple/container
- Someone1234 8mo agoIf 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. What I'd personally consider is: - Standard gets 16 GB vRAM (to perfectly target the base MacBook Air). But leave it at 4-6 vCPUs to not compete with the Pro (still for general computing, not power-users) - New "Lite" tier with 8 GB vRAM max for the Neo (4 vCPUs). Increasing to 12 GB vRAM if the Neo does. Then you target a $89 price point one-time-purchase for the "Lite" tier. Essentially three plans, targeting your three major demographics: budget, standard, and pro/power-user.
- conradev 8mo agoVMWare 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.
- JSR_FDED 8mo agoI’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.
- deleted 8mo ago[deleted]
- vbezhenar 8mo agoMacOS has always been incredibly bloated.
- LoganDark 8mo agoThere'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 as bloated if you don't use them.
- p_ing 8mo agoThe definition of bloat is something that you don’t use, even if someone else does.
- phs318u 8mo agoThere’s a big difference between unnecessary applications taking up space on your storage device, and unnecessary services running in the background competing for RAM and CPU with the applications you actually want to run.
- p_ing 8mo agoYou've defined every OS that doesn't let you customize what services run, which Windows certainly does. As you strip away certain services, functionality is going to be limited, but the capability is there and has been since NT was released - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VxIgY0tQqR4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VxIgY0tQqR4. You have options on macOS via launchctl, but I'm not sure how low you can go. Neither give you the same capability as Linux, of course.
- dude250711 8mo agoNow just needs to have that pre-installed by Apple, and macOS somehow hidden during boot time.
- Kwpolska 8mo ago> Windows 11 VM requires a minimum of 4GB of RAM to function You can give it less. It may refuse to install, but even without using any workarounds, you can change the assigned RAM after installing and it will not refuse to boot. The minimum for Windows Server 2025 is 2 GB, and it’s basically the same OS (just with less bloat).
- moralestapia 8mo agoNice! The best Windows laptop you can buy is still a MacBook.
- bitwize 8mo agoKinda like how back in the day, the best Mac you could buy was an Amiga. :)
- raw_anon_1111 8mo agoI was around and in the comp.sys.amiga.advocacy wars. That was always a load of BS.
- timbit42 8mo agoThat'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.
- raw_anon_1111 8mo agoI 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.
- giancarlostoro 8mo agoSo in other words... We COULD in theory run Windows on our iPhones.
- paxys 8mo agoIn theory you can run any software on any hardware.
- giancarlostoro 8mo agoOh I fully get that, what I mean is in a viable way.
- hedora 8mo agohttps://copy.sh/v86/ https://copy.sh/v86/
- layer8 8mo agoIt was already demonstrated in practice: https://www.xda-developers.com/tiny11-dev-windows-11-iphone-15-pro/ https://www.xda-developers.com/tiny11-dev-windows-11-iphone-... Also: https://getutm.app/ https://getutm.app/
- happymellon 8mo agoWe had WinCE. No thanks.
- arjunchint 8mo agoJust need to download some more memory
- rationalist 8mo agoHere you go! https://DownloadMoreRAM.com https://DownloadMoreRAM.com
- roody15 8mo agoMacBook 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.
- ActorNightly 8mo agoITs 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.
- raw_anon_1111 8mo agoAnd run what on the Chromebook exactly?
- ActorNightly 8mo agoWeb browser and youtube. You know, what people mostly do on macbooks.
- raw_anon_1111 8mo agoBut that’s all you can do on Chromebooks.
- ActorNightly 8mo agoAre you sure about that?
- hodgehog11 8mo ago
- dana321 8mo agoNot many people know this, but you can use wine on macos. brew install wine-stable or package any windows app with your own environment: brew install --cask Sikarugir-App/sikarugir/sikarugir
- robmccoll 8mo agoI sometimes run Xubuntu on my phone via termux and proot. The hardware we carry around in our pockets is ridiculously capable.
- qalmakka 8mo agoThere'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
- superjan 8mo agoOn 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 x64 windows apps.
- qalmakka 8mo agoYeah 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
- kampan 8mo agoHey
- ruined 8mo agohey
- mrichman 8mo agoHow is this even usable with 8GB RAM?
- Gigachad 8mo agomacOS is significantly better built than Windows.
- jml7c5 8mo agoPeople keep claiming this, but my experience is that it's pretty similar. My mom's PC accidentally had only 4GB of RAM for the past 5 years (whoops), and we only noticed it a month ago because the cheap SSD was finally dying due to heavy swapping.
- p_ing 8mo agoThe kernel is technically inferior to NT, especially with memory management (see OOM on macOS while NT will keep going).
- Gigachad 8mo agoThe 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.
- wolvoleo 8mo agoI think the work "run" is going to be an overstatement with 8GB for both macos and windows :) I think crawl would be more appropriate.
- thelastgallon 8mo agoApple 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 Android vs iOS devices.
- materielle 8mo agoWhat’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: this is going to be big in developing Markets. This is within budget for middle class Latin Americans in a way that even the Air isn’t.
- deleted 8mo ago[deleted]
- thelastgallon 8mo agoYou are probably right. Just saw the news about Google Fiber being sold. What a shame!
- dangus 8mo agoI 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 laptops, and some odd compromises that are unique to Apple’s machine: No haptic trackpad, no keyboard backlight, no Touch ID on the cheap model, lower-end screen, very small battery, tiny slow charger included, minimal and performance compromised I/O, below-par RAM, worse speakers/microphones, an old nothing-special processor. This is the exact same stuff that people have complained about for years with cheap laptops. The fact that the computer is made of aluminum is really a distraction from these facts. This idea that it’s Google versus Apple all over again is just not true. Windows is the dominant OS in the laptop space by far. Over 900 billion people in the world play PC games on windows, for example. If you look at Best Buy street pricing, what Apple has pulled off here is not that impressive. Let’s say you want the top end Neo model at $699. Spend $100 more at Best Buy and you’ll end up with a Yoga 7 machine with double the RAM, double the storage (1TB), 70Whr battery, and a very capable and efficient AMD Ryzen 7 AI 350 chip that has faster multicore and same or faster graphics performance. You’ll gain user-replaceable SSD, backlit keyboard, convertible OLED touch screen, digital pen support, more and faster USB ports, microSD slot, HDMI port, fast charger in the box, better speakers, WiFi 7, bigger screen in a more popular 14” size…it’s a better buy that will last years longer for only a slight price increase (or, spend less on the Ryzen 5 AI 340 variant ($680) if you’re okay with compromising GPU performance, which most people in this category are, and you’ll still end up with double the RAM of the Neo and 512GB storage at $20 less than Apple’s non-education store price) Seriously, give me a good reason to buy a Neo over a machine like this. What is actually better about the Mac objectively? https://www.bestbuy.com/product/lenovo-yoga-7-2-in-1-copilot-pc-14-2k-oled-touchscreen-laptop-amd-ryzen-ai-5-340-2025-16gb-memory-512gb-ssd-seashell/JJGSHC5C4F/sku/6615841 https://www.bestbuy.com/product/lenovo-yoga-7-2-in-1-copilot...
- econ 8mo agoThis is actually hilarious, the OSes are so bloated GBs of ram isn't enough to fit two. The sheer amount of useless nonsense that must be in memory.
- neonstatic 8mo agoI have mixed feelings about Parallels. On one hand, it's good to be able to run a Windows VM, that generally works and is usable. On the other hand, in my niche that became a lazy vendor's equivalent of "we support MacOS".
- coldtea 8mo agoIt's a computer. CPU wise is about a slightly better M1 - which even today is quite a beast. It's not surprising that it can run anything a 8GB M1 could... Geez...
- serf 8mo agoa VM host with a windows guest and a total of 8gb of ram? Yeah you'll get the OS to run, the magic there is making either environment usable. Might be great for some web dev that needs to see what their work looks like elsewhere -- but even then imagining a modern Windows install w/ AI add-ins, local search caching and update deltas then running firefox or chrome with 4 gb of memory sort of makes me cringe. Godspeed, I guess. Some of the best works of art were made with very serious constraints, but I don't have that kind of time anymore.
- 0-R-1-0-N 8mo agoYeah I have an M2 MacBook Air with 8GB of ram and it runs but it very sluggish. I do use utm but its windows arm.
- assaddayinh 8mo ago[dead]
- nelsonic 8mo agoGenuine question: who would buy a MacBook Neo to run Windows on it…? Surely people buying Neo are trying to escape MicroSlop?!
- aqme28 8mo agoIt’s a lot easier to escape Microsoft if for the one or two tools that still require windows, you can just emulate windows.
- wil421 8mo agoMy buddy owns several Firehouse restaurants. There’s a couple windows programs he uses to run his businesses. Not having a way to virtualize windows was a show stopper when the ARM Macs came out. Same with my father in law who’s a general contractor. He uses some freeware estimate program and an extremely old photoshop he got in the early 2000s. He also went through 2 crappy Amazon bought chrome books for his wife that could barely function. The Air was too pricey.
- zerr 8mo agoCan it run Windows and Linux natively though?
- GoblinSlayer 8mo agoI get it now. That's the reason for bloat: to make virtualization impractical by consuming all resources.
- evanjrowley 8mo agoApple, please give us this capability on the iPhone/iPad, then watch your competitor Microsoft burn faster. And no, not a "slow edition" like we have today: https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2024/07/apples-restrictions-hold-back-the-first-pc-emulator-on-the-ios-app-store/ https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2024/07/apples-restrictions-h...
- jnaina 8mo agoapple 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.
- rldjbpin 8mo agobuying a $500 laptop to run a software that costs starting from $99 a year* is a funny situation. anyways, the fact that it works means in terms of architecture the A and M series do not need much work between them, or it has been done already. with the (premium) chromebook parallels being drawn, having the linux experience, a la chroot, would be a more interesting point for the crowd reading this.