Parallels confirms MacBook Neo can run Windows in a virtual machine (macrumors.com)

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.

I daily-drive a base level MacBook Air M1 with 8GB RAM for writing docs and some light coding in VIM/VSCode. Never had any issues.

When I need more I offload tasks to a remote VM (usually AWS/GCP). I can easily afford a top spec Mac but chose this because I want to have a “entry level” device that I don’t mind my kids breaking or getting stolen at public co-working space.

Plenty of people will get MacBook Neo and never hit its limitations. Most students/educators and many professionals just use the web all day and never need much RAM.

Having said all that, Apple could easily have made it 16GB cleaned up the market place and nobody would be talking about Neo being under spec’d. But Tim Cook has to be a Tim Cook and squeeze every last penny of profit. ;-)

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.

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.

So, you are not in the market for a $600 computer then. Agreed?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47372989

Going to guess you aren’t a student

Even if your only use case is using Chrome?

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.

Why are you flexing like this?

What's your purpose?

If yours are all over 7 years old you really have no idea what a modern Mac can do with 8-16GB of ram…

> 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

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.

They already had that exact strategy between 2012 and 2020.

Except you have to run Tahoe

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.

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

> 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...

In the EU it costs $200 more so it's more like a low to mid range laptop.

I have a feeling these are aimed at the same sector as the Framework 12, school provided laptops for kids meant to be bought in bulk by institutions. But there they're competing against $150 Chromebooks and neither is even close.

> parts replacement

For a $400 laptop?

M1 macbook air has been available at Walmart priced at $600-650 for years (8gb, 256 ssd). Why did that not cannibalize Apple's laptop market?

I think this is actually the reason the Neo has 8 GB of RAM (non-upgradable). It’s their anti-cannibalization strategy.

They’re relying on the huge portion of their existing laptop market who self-identifies as “tech-savvy” or “enthusiast” and thinks 8 GB of RAM is a non-starter.

Those folks will keep buying Mac laptops at double (or triple, quadruple, …) the price.

> Apple is going to cannibalize their own laptop market.

As long as you buy a Mac laptop, Apple is fine with that, regardless of which one. That’s because they know who their customers are.

The Neo is in its own category; the $599/$699 Neo doesn’t compete with a 14-inch MacBook Pro with a M5 Pro, 24GB of RAM, and 1 TB SSD at $1899. If you know you need more RAM and storage than Neo, the M5 Mac Air is $1099. But if you need to stay under $1000, the decision is clear.

If anything, the Neo is more competitive with the entry-level iPad with 128 GB of storage at $349; with Apple's keyboard at $249, the total is $598, $1 less than the entry-level Neo.

For someone who wants a "real" laptop with more flexibility than an iPad, getting the $599 Neo is a no-brainer.

They are just covering all the market segments. This is for people who didn't want to shell out $1000 for a laptop for their kid, or have another one just to browse the web. Or they have an iphone but not a mac laptop, but now they might want one cause it's even cheaper than a phone. This will be pushed into schools probably as well.

This is really not the right comparison to make. An OS will use memory liberally. Give it more and it'll use more. Give it less and it'll swap to disk. So the real question is how long a given workload takes to complete, or whether you can multi-task without shitting out to/from disk every time you switch windows. "My OS uses X amount of RAM" is an entirely meaningless and irrelevant statement.

Browsers use available RAM for cache, but they don't require that much. Firefox officially supports running on Macs down to 512MB of RAM. It will just be slower.

Macos will try and keep available memory used.

Launch a few more applications and you'll see everything sort of still keeps working at an acceptable responsiveness.

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

And run what on the Chromebook exactly?

The Chromebook would be slow and run worse software. So… but also yeah nobody wants to look like a peasant.

What school IT director does this?

> This isn't a novelty it will crush the low end of the PC market.

You took what I said out of context and then replied to something else. Running Parallels on a Neo is a novelty. Parallels is both what the thread is about AND what my reply was expressly about.

Nobody can reasonably read what I wrote, in context, and believe I was referring to the computer itself as a novelty.

How is VM support relevant to mass adoption? Norms don't use VMs.

Most people run Windows just fine on cheap laptops with 4GB of RAM.

These won't run Crysis, but they don't need to.

You can also use UTM to run Windows for free and it is open source.

https://mac.getutm.app

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).

In practice I think this is going to be very specific to your data being good for compression and not already compressed - so not gaming, where textures can fill up the Neo's 8GB very fast depending on the game: Cyberpunk, Robocop, Bioshock and Shadow of the Tomb Raider benchmarks are showing 9 - 10 GB of RAM used at just 720p.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uOe-Ock4pnw

9.2.2 wasn't

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 as bloated if you don't use them.

That one has a lower pixel density. 162 ppi for the Yoga vs 219 for the Neo. My MacBook Air M3 is 224 and I can't image going much lower, even for OLED. Maybe if I watched more videos.

Damn, an OLED screen at my go-to 14" screen size, and I can actually run Fedora on it? Going to have to do some more research on this thing...

> 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

Ish. It’s better in some ways, like single core and maybe multi, but not by a ton. At the same time I think the M1 may have more raw GPU power, though missing a few fancy features.

Hardware is mostly worse, but that’s to be expected for the price. And nothing terrible, just little cuts all over.

Always excited to hear about fellow M1 users. I’m not limited in the slightest. 5-6 years strong now?

It 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.

Umm that's a lightweight VM just like WSL2, not native Linux.

It's funny that we're not even considering native but like, at all.

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.

Has anyone verified that the Virtualization framework indeed works on the Neo/A18, since the framework requires chip-level support?

Nobody is moving to Linux because there’s an iCloud replacement waiting for them over there…

Have you confirmed this? I haven't seen anyone concretely describe the boot policy of the Neo yet (it should be an easy enough check for anyone who has one in-hand).

Oh I fully get that, what I mean is in a viable way.

There's an unspoken rule in corporate America, colleges, etc. Laptops MUST be loaded down with terrible software, no exceptions. My last corporate laptop actually had the paid version of winzip in 2025, and it ran with a little tray icon that I couldn't disable or remove. That was in addition to all the other corporate crap I couldn't remove.

Some of this is not _just_ a corporate problem. Why would Winzip have an auto run application and tray application in the first place? Every single app seems to think they need one, and it's a classical tragedy of the commons. Perhaps on a virgin Windows install, your app with autorun and a tray icon will be more responsive. But when 20 other apps pull that same trick, no one wins.

This is actually one of the reasons I'm not excited at the idea of Linux defeating Windows. If it did, corporations would just start crapping up Linux the way they've crapped up Windows.

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.

A bank I worked at had one so bad that at 9am when everyone was logging in or forcing updates it could take 15 minutes to be usable. And every couple of weeks they'd force update just to change everyone's lock screen to something like "I support pride month"

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?

No this is not just an enterprise issue. I waited 10 seconds (I counted.) for a Windows Explorer context menu to open the other day. This is on a fully decked out system with an Ultra 9 cpu and a 4090 and 32gb of memory, and basically no apps running. I think I had 2 tabs in Edge? Windows is a shitshow these days.

Corporate spyware is pretty nasty, regardless of platform. When I was at FB, they had something that forced a kernel module that was incompatible with the next big OS release; and I had accidentally disabled the FB spyware scripts. I set /etc/hosts to immutable because I was tired of them fucking with it ... didn't realize that's why things were better for the next 3 months, until I did the major update and I had to fix things from safe mode ... where everything only barely works.

Microsoft also puts a lot of crap into a default install that you may want to disable. Windows 11 with some judicious policy editor settings isn't so awful.

Outside corporate setting, it is also the fact that most windows systems you encounter are installed on cheap machines by people who just care that their word processor works a few times a month. And you were probably forced to fix it.

At the same time, as someone with a well maintained Windows gaming rig, I don't like spending time in the OS these days. Something about transparently doing stuff that puts money in their pocket while inconveniencing me gives me the ick.

This has always been my experience even just this past week. The system feels so unresponsive.

Like, the UI shows my hovers and interactions live but clicking things just takes time to do the corresponding result.

Oh yeah no... its still terrible even without all the spyware.

First experience of Windows 11, trying to download a file through firefox caused my 18 core 10980xe to have the entire UI freeze for the full time the download was going.

Reverted back to windows 10 immediately and the problem went away.

Windows 11 is full of spyware from the Mothership

I've said for decades that from a user perspective, malware scanners and prevention tools are fundamentally indistinguishable from actual malware. They intercept file accesses, block you from doing what you want to do, pop things up all over the place, and make your machine slow aand unreliable.

I’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.

what? on a semi modern CPU and a SATA / M2 SSD?? My Vista laptop on a spinning drive took that long to boot I am pretty sure. I am flabbergasted if this is true

Yep.

A Neo will win a race with a similar speed Windows computer full of bundled crap and security slop.

But it would work the other way around too.

The nice thing about Macs is even if you see a lot of what Apple puts on the computers as useless trash (“Why the hell do I need iBooks?”) it’s not stuff running in the background interfering with everything you do the way bad PC security software bundled on cheap Windows PCs or forced by corporate often does.

I can tell you my last work Mac slowed down noticeably (though not too bad, luckily) the day they decided to put the corporate security crud on it.

The newer security crud we use now seems much better behaved though.

The cpu in Neo is 2-3 times faster.

How do you know a Neo cannot survive a fall onto a concrete floor? I think it would take at least ten tests each with a new machine to get some confidence of the impossibility of that.

Unless you are a time traveler that is very likely not true.

>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?

You're correct, GP's understanding of how wear leveling works is off by several layers. Counting the number of BGA packages tells you nothing. There are multiple NAND dies per package, multiple planes per die, many blocks per plane, and the size of each erase block is the largest-scale feature that is relevant to wear leveling.

>Most flash has average wear out after 300k cycles

No it doesn't. Most 1TB drives are rated for around 600 TBW, so enough to overwrite the drive 600 times, nowhere near 300k cycles. If you search for specs of NAND chips used in SSDs, you'll find they're rated for cycles on the order of hundreds to thousands, still nowhere near "300k".

https://www.techpowerup.com/ssd-specs/crucial-mx500-4-tb.d95...

12GB a day isn't very much. If your working set is larger than the 8GB RAM, you're swapping multiple times per second. It doesn't take very many megabytes per swap to reach 12GB if you're doing that multiple times per second.

that doesn't maths

The 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.

The 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.

The first Apple Silicon developer boxes were Mac Minis with A series chips so I wouldn’t have expected any issues.

Speculation 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.

Thats pretty cool.

So they're purposefully crippling it?

What do you mean by Apple restrictions?

Are they arbitrary restrictions Apple puts on them to prevent this kind of thong?

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

People 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.