Parallels confirms MacBook Neo can run Windows in a virtual machine

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. 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.

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.

> 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).

So in other words... We COULD in theory run Windows on our iPhones.

Not 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.

Nice!

The best Windows laptop you can buy is still a MacBook.

“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.”

If Parallels can run it, UTM likely can run a fair bit too.

does that mean since this is the iPhone 16 cpu, by proxy the iPhone 16 can also run Windows in a virtual machine?

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

Man, 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.

Now just needs to have that pre-installed by Apple, and macOS somehow hidden during boot time.

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.

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 win. The most ridicuous thing about the laptop is that it appears to be reparable which sort of tells me this is a template similar to the M1 Air of the future laptop designs that Apple will come out with. [2]

[1] https://samhenri.gold/blog/20260312-this-is-not-the-computer...

[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PbPCGqoBB4Y

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.

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

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.

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).

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.

I wrote about how Unified Memory, SSD directly attached to the SoC and Apple's use of real-time compression saves memory, reduces power consumption and wear on SSDs [1].

[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47354705

MacOS has always been incredibly bloated.

> Windows 11 VM requires a minimum of 4GB of RAM to function

If Parallels can run it, UTM likely can run a fair bit too.

Now just needs to have that pre-installed by Apple, and macOS somehow hidden during boot time.

Nice!

The best Windows laptop you can buy is still a MacBook.

Kinda like how back in the day, the best Mac you could buy was an Amiga. :)

Yes; macOS has native container support for Linux [1].

[1]: https://github.com/apple/container

In a vm, I don't see why not.

In a VM, definitely. Just like other Macs.

Just run WSL inside of Windows.

Likely yes, eventually

Native, no. That would cannibalise Apple services which is a huge source of revenue for them.

So in other words... We COULD in theory run Windows on our iPhones.

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 theory you can run any software on any hardware.

Isn’t basically m1 air equivalent in specs?

I’ve got that one and I’m yet to feel limited.

It uses the iphone processor (which I think still might be one of those Mchips?) so I think it was ok to be unsure.

Virtualization 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

Yeah. 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.

Man, 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.

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. 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).

>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.

I thought wear leveling worked at the page/block level, not the chip level? On an SSD, if there was a failure of an entire chip, you're still screwed.

The M2 MacBook Air base model has 8GB RAM and a single 256GB NAND chip. Nearly 4 years later, it doesn't seem to have caused any problems.

from 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-t...

Most flash has average wear out after 300k cycles. Let's say 64GB is used for swap. That's 19200 TB or 19.2 PETABYTES of Swap usage. Let's say you swap 12GB a day, you will burn out that 64GB of Flash Storage in 4.38 years and my guess is that amount of swap usage is extremely high that user would probably replace laptop sooner out of performance frustration.

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 laptops loaded with endpoint management and security software. Some of those endpoint control solutions are so heavy that the laptop feels like you've traveled back in time 15 years and you're using a mechanical hard drive.

Took 6 minutes from power button to login prompt this morning. Probably even longer from login responsive desktop. So yes, probably!

corporate laptops is the key here. take 2 identical laptops one with and one without the spyware - its night and day in both performance and battery life.

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.

Geekbench 6 was around ~2600 single-core with the VM overhead for me. That's still punching above single-core power in its class for Windows machines and it makes me giggle.

https://browser.geekbench.com/v6/cpu/17011372

This was the latest UTM in the App Store, so native Hypervisor.Framework access for arm64 Windows acceleration.

Wouldn't corporate spyware equally burden the NEO? Especially more give the 8GB of RAM vs 16+ on X64 laptops? Chrome, Teams, IDEs, websites etc are equally bloated on both platforms.

does that mean since this is the iPhone 16 cpu, by proxy the iPhone 16 can also run Windows in a virtual machine?

Maybe/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.

Is this a trick question? Of course. However Apple imposed artificial limitations, like disabling JIT.

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

[1] https://samhenri.gold/blog/20260312-this-is-not-the-computer...

[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PbPCGqoBB4Y

I wrote about how Unified Memory, SSD directly attached to the SoC and Apple's use of real-time compression saves memory, reduces power consumption and wear on SSDs [1].

[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47354705

Yes; macOS has native container support for Linux [1].

[1]: https://github.com/apple/container

> 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.

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

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

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 as bloated if you don't use them.

In a VM, definitely. Just like other Macs.

In a vm, I don't see why not.

Kinda like how back in the day, the best Mac you could buy was an Amiga. :)

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.

The M2 MacBook Air base model has 8GB RAM and a single 256GB NAND chip. Nearly 4 years later, it doesn't seem to have caused any problems.

I thought wear leveling worked at the page/block level, not the chip level? On an SSD, if there was a failure of an entire chip, you're still screwed.

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

https://mac.getutm.app

Last I checked UTM doesn't have GPU acceleration. Parallels' proprietary GPU driver is the only reason to pay for it.

In theory you can run any software on any hardware.

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

Isn’t basically m1 air equivalent in specs?

I’ve got that one and I’m yet to feel limited.

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.

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

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-t...

Just run WSL inside of Windows.

Likely yes, eventually

Virtualization 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

>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?

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 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?

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.

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.

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.

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.

>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.

Native, no. That would cannibalise Apple services which is a huge source of revenue for them.

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).

It uses the iphone processor (which I think still might be one of those Mchips?) so I think it was ok to be unsure.

corporate laptops is the key here. take 2 identical laptops one with and one without the spyware - its night and day in both performance and battery life.

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.

Took 6 minutes from power button to login prompt this morning. Probably even longer from login responsive desktop. So yes, probably!

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

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

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.

Last I checked UTM doesn't have GPU acceleration. Parallels' proprietary GPU driver is the only reason to pay for it.

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.

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

>Most flash has average wear out after 300k cycles

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

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

The instruction set is not the issue, the issue is on ARM there's no standardized way like on x86 to talk to specialized hardware, so drivers must be reimplemented with very little documentation.

As 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.

Same Armv8 ISA. And it's the same ISA Android Linux has run on for over a decade.

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

I’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…

Yeah, 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.