Parallels confirms MacBook Neo can run Windows in a virtual machine
macrumors.com247 points by tosh 17 hours ago
247 points by tosh 17 hours ago
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 don't know. Both of my macs are over 7 years old, and have at least 32GB of RAM. Certainly would not buy an 8GB one now.
If you have 32GB Macs, and you had them 7 years ago already, you're not even remotely close to the target market for it.
Parent said "In the education market, educators, students, aides... nothing close at this price point".
That has zero overlap with the "felt the need for 32GB 7 years ago" not-exactly-crowd.
>If you have 32GB Macs, and you had them 7 years ago already, you're not even remotely close to the target market for it.
that market is already saturated with a zillion decent-spec chromebook style machines. The only reason the Neo market is even slightly different is to cater to crowds that want the apple offerings for OS and fashion/reputation.
The market we're talking about has no real reason to care what kind of chip is in the thing. They just want YouTube/Discord/Zoom/EduWebsites to work right.
> a zillion decent-spec chromebook style machines
The interesting/unique thing about Apple's offering at this price point is the build quality, not the spec.
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 who thought it'd be a good idea to stick stickers on their take-home laptop) without worrying about either the adhesive or the thinner permanently damaging the chassis.
In both cases, Apple can actually promise this with the Neo, while none of the Chromebook OEMs can for their equivalent offerings at this price point. (The other OEMs can promise it, but only for offerings at higher price-points schools aren't willing to pay.)
Also, Apple can now promise that you can keep a pile of spares and spare parts, and swap parts between them easily, replace consumables like batteries, etc. (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PbPCGqoBB4Y). Which is essentially table stakes for the education market, but it's good that they've caught up.
I haven't bought an 8GB laptop since probably 2012 when I got a Sony Vaio that they upgrade to 12GB for free because of a delivery delay. I wouldn't buy an 8GB device in 2026, but this device isn't targeted at either of us.
For a lot of people who are looking at sub $800 laptops, the option to get an Apple will probably be enough to convince them. And apart from the limited memory, it really isn't a bad buy.
I also fully expect most budget devices to ship with 8GB of memory until the end of the DDR5 crisis anyway.
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.
the slowest DDR4 is capable of 12.6GB/s~ish per channel .
nowhere near the same performance.
If people want to emulate what it is like to have low memory on your current mac, you can run `memory_pressure` on the cli.
That was all x86_64, but even if aarch64 is more memory efficient, it can’t be too drastic, and 8GiB was borderline unusable even 10 years ago.
Nowadays it must be a teeth-grinding tight fit for a browser and couple Electron apps, held together on a prayer next website doesn’t go too crazy with the bells and whistles and wasn’t vibeslopped with utter disregard to any big-Os.
> even if aarch64 is more memory efficient, it can’t be too drastic
Why not? All the other advantages of M processors (performance, battery life) have absolutely been drastic
Because look around - same code compiled for x86_64 and aarch64 is not that drastically different in size, save for some special cases (like NumPy). Data structures are going to have even less differences. Then, assets are the same.
I’ve cursorily checked few programs and difference seemed to about 10-20% (with some exceptions), so 8GiB RAM on an aarch64 is like 10GB on x86_64. Significantly nicer, not a life-changing nicer - you’re still very limited.
Edit: Next comment has a very good point about memory and SSD bandwidth increases, allowing faster swap and compressed RAM performance. That’s something I haven’t considered. So maybe it’ll feel closer to a 16GiB old machine or something like that…
Yeah. Also the bandwidth of modern soldered-on Mac SSDs is insane compared to where it was in the Intel era. The performance impact of moving applications in and out of swap should be much lower than it was a few years ago.
> Also the bandwidth of modern soldered-on Mac SSDs is insane compared to where it was in the Intel era.
This is because they're newer, not because they're soldered. PCIe 5.0 NVMe drives can do ~15GB/s without being soldered.
That’s a fair point, I totally missed this factor, mostly thinking about binary sizes. You’re right, it would be different because of this.
If yours are all over 7 years old you really have no idea what a modern Mac can do with 8-16GB of ram…
8GB of RAM. Not 16GB. And oh yes, the modern Mac shares those 8GB with the video RAM...
> And oh yes, the modern Mac shares those 8GB with the video RAM...
The Unified Memory Architecture is why these Macs are so fast—no wasted cycles moving data between RAM and GPU. And the data is compressed in real-time so less data has to be transferred and there's less ware and tear on the SSD, which is directly to SoC [1].
UMAs aren't made for speed, but for power savings. You are ignoring the fact that a discrete GPU accesses VRAM and caches at much higher bandwidths (and power) than an iGPU does RAM. Shared mem also comes at the cost of keeping it coherent between CPU/GPU. So you can't just look at one part of the system and then claim that UMAs must be faster because there are no data transfers.
And by the way, even on UMAs, the iGPU can still have a dedicated segment of memory not readable by the CPU. Therefore UMA does not imply there won't be data transfers.
Well yes it's still only 8GB shared between macos, the VM and the graphics buffers. On a mobile chip.
People whip out “mobile chip” like this thing is going to crawl. It is faster than the Apple M1 (and runs the same software).
This is Apple's "Nintendo moment" when they realize they can package old hardware and win on polish and ecosystem.
> This is Apple's "Nintendo moment" when they realize they can package old hardware and win on polish and ecosystem.
The A18 Pro isn't even two years old yet; it debuted in iPhone 16 Pro and 16 Pro Max September 2024. What's funny is none of the PC laptops manufactures can match the speed and quality of the Neo.
The benchmarks for the A18 Pro are impressive; its Single Thread Performance beats all mobile processors [1]; remember this processor was created for a phone:
Apple A18 Pro 4,091
Apple M1 8 Core 3200 MHz. 3,675
Apple A15 Bionic 3,579
AMD Ryzen Z1 Extreme 3,546
AMD Ryzen 5 PRO 230 3,538
Apple A14 Bionic 3,382
Intel Core i5-1235U 3,090
Apple A13 Bionic 2,354
Intel N150 1,902
Intel N100 1,893
AMD Ryzen Embedded R1505G 1,820
Outside of some specialized benchmarks only Geekbench 6 is more or less usable for comparisons between generations or manufacturers.
Apple have historically moved forward minimum requirements for macOS and apps a bit aggressively. They need to slow that down now if they want us to take the macbook neo seriously.
I’d disable major OS updates and stay on Tahoe, and only upgrade if other Neo owners report it’s ok to do so. Ive been burned by iOS updates that made the phone sluggish enough times.
Not necessarily a reason to avoid the Neo, for the right use case. If I had secondary school kids they’d get one of these, but something to bear in mind.
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.
It's really quite bad. 'Telegram Lite' is using 1.16GB with just a single chat vs Signal using 193MB. Somehow vscode (including their renderers) manages to come in pretty low compared to even Apples native apps.
> Somehow vscode (including their renderers) manages to come in pretty low compared to even Apples native apps.
Because the issue isn't electron, it's not freeing resources which you can do in any language/platform.
Ironically probably one of my biggest reasons against buying one is it's obvious desirability.
I've already once in my life been in a situation where I can say with certainty the only reason my laptop wasn't stolen is that it wasn't a MacBook(despite having equal or above retail purchase value). I wouldn't be surprised if there's more that I never knew about.
How easy is it to flip a macbook tied to an apple id? i'd imagine you'd have to sell it for parts.
Granted, selling this one for parts might literally be easier.
PC makers are going to stop some of the artificial segmentation they used on the lower price devices, and that is going to hurt the sales of their higher-end lines. There is no reason they kept pushing 70 percent srgb panels on even the mid tier Thinkpads when the Neo has a good display.
I wonder if it’s less about price and more about supply chains. Are there enough manufacturing capacity to allow every laptop maker to secure enough supply?
In advance of the neo’s release, Apple probably invested billions in ensuring the supply chain was ready.
I can't imagine the low end materials actually save that much cost anyway.
There's a tremendous amount of Bill-of-Materials inflation where a part that cost $5 more translates to $50 retail price increase when the actual work and engineering cost is exactly the same. This is one of the terribly annoying facts of product design, the incredible premium you have to pay for good parts that don't actually cost very much at all.
That sounds great and like capitalism is working for once in terms of increased competition causes companies to produce more for less
In the US, cheap ThinkPads like E14 sometimes sell for a bit less when you factor in all typical discounts. They are good machines that run Linux well and can be repaired.
In EU, and I imagine other markets, there's nothing remotely close. I hope this puts some pressure on Lenovo and the rest of manufacturers to be more competitive.
> and can be repaired
The Macbook Neo is highly repairable too [1]. Not _quite_ as repairable as some Thinkpads with a 10/10 score, but still pretty respectable at a 6/10 with easily replaceable batteries and stuff.
[1] https://www.ifixit.com/News/116152/macbook-neo-is-the-most-r...
8 GB RAM and 6/10 "respectable" repairability.
RAM has no bearing on repairability? And yes, sure stuff is soldered to the motherboard, but everything is basically modular outside of it, you can replace every big part pretty easily, and no glue, even for the battery
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?
Soldering RAM isn't for compact size or cost or to keep you from upgrading, it's for speed. Soldered RAM can be physically closer with a faster bus than removable RAM.
With old style DIMMs I can understand this excuse, with LPCAMM though, it doesn't fly.
Yes it does. LPCAMM path is still dozens of millimeters. Soldered on is one mm or less.