Parallels confirms MacBook Neo can run Windows in a virtual machine
macrumors.com
macrumors.com
Did they give up a large chunk of margin, or have they been able to offset some of the higher costs of commodity chips by replacing high margin components with their own in house designs?
Designing and manufacturing your own components (CPU/GPU, Cellular modem, WiFi/Bluetooth, etc.) isn't free, but it's cheaper than paying someone else a markup at Apple's scale.
I expect a price increase. They had a bunch of hardware releases planned far in advance of the supply chain disruption. It'd be a bad look for their new products if they raised the prices on all these new devices at the same time; that'd be the primary discussion everywhere.
The smart move would be to release all your cool new toys at the traditional price points (or very nearly the same) and then raise prices a bit down the road. This way your reviews are strictly about the hardware / products rather than the prices. Bump them in two months. It'll be a big story, but it didn't prevent all the glowing reviews that were already published.
I think the Neo, possibly the 'e' phone, might be the only device(s) that doesn't increase. Taking a hit on 8GB of RAM might be tolerable for market gains when they're charging a kidney and a lung for higher-end devices.
The Google default deal? That’s a massive chunk of services. App Store junk fees? The other massive part of it. The rest of their services are a much smaller part.
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.
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.
Yeah, come back in a year when we have sales numbers for the Neo and tell me how saturated it is.
>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.
No, the real main reason is that the "zillion decent-spec chromebook style machines" are half-arsed and/or less powered and with worse build quality depending on the model. The "OS and fashion/reputation" are a bonus.
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.
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 think this has more to do with binned A18 Pro SoCs which enables Apple to do this with economies of scale. A later version may get the 12GB variant of the A19 Pro SoCs.
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.
I tried, DaVinci Resolve still works :)
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 not? All the other advantages of M processors (performance, battery life) have absolutely been drastic
What's your purpose?
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
More efficient software benefits everyone.
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.
Nintendo Switch - 279 euro
Nintendo Switch 2 - 489 euro
Neo with a proper SSD size - 800 euro.
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.
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.
Taxes are also included in the EU price, but not the US price.
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...
And then there is the rest of the globe.
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.
In advance of the neo’s release, Apple probably invested billions in ensuring the supply chain was ready.
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.
Granted, selling this one for parts might literally be easier.
For a $400 laptop?
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’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.
If next iteration has A19 pro chip in it - it will have 12gb.
It has 8 GB of RAM because they wouldn’t be able to hit the price point of $599 with more; their target audience doesn't need more. It's also why the SSD is slower than a MacBook Pro or MacBook Air; it's the only device in the lineup other than the entry-level iPad with a sRGB display; the other devices have P3 Wide Color Displays. No Thunderbolt ports, only supports 1 external display and only at 4K. No Wi-Fi 7.
These are some of the compromises they made to keep the price down. They're also using a binned A18 Pro with 5 GPU cores instead of the 6 core version in the iPhone 16 Pro and Pro Max.
There are lots of potential customer for which a Mac laptop was out of reach; it's a lot more affordable at $49.91 /month for 12 months for the $599 model.
Its display is better than PC laptops in the same price range, but that display is a non-starter for graphic designers, video editors, etc.
That's why cannibalization is a non-issue.
The iPhone has done well.
The memory eaters most people are complaining about are not workloads, but shitty communication apps that keep all those cat pictures from the last 4 months uncompressed in ram...
Launch a few more applications and you'll see everything sort of still keeps working at an acceptable responsiveness.
Intel doesn't even remotely compare to ARM. Even an M1 8GB would far outperform what you have now.
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.
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.
[1] https://samhenri.gold/blog/20260312-this-is-not-the-computer...
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.
Someone suggested that people with 10k karma and/or 10 years subscription to this site should be able to do things (such as auto-ban) to those accounts.
The account that misrepresented your comment and thus acted in bad faith is one of those 10k+ accounts.
To me, this is a data point showing the fallacy of long term subscription and/or karma accrual as evidence of their quality/good faith abilities
These won't run Crysis, but they don't need to.
And if they can do that, they can get them (at full MSRP) for about half the price of a MacBook Neo.
Heck, you can get 8GB Windows laptops with twice the SSD size of the MacBook Neo's for a little over half of the Neo’s price (again, at full MSRP.)
Windows 7. Windows 10 eats about 6GB (custom IoT with a lot of things disabled).
Neo is a parody of a computer.
There was simply no need to upgrade, the MacMini was faster in all regards then my Intel MBP. Out of curiosity of its capability I wanted to see how gaming performs - I ended up playing through all three Tomb Raider reboots (Mac native, but using Rosetta!) at 1080p in high settings. Absolutely amazed how fast it was (mostly driven by the update to M2).
Only one thing ever made me notice the lack of RAM, and that was when I was running the entire test suite of our frontend monorepo. This runs concurrently and fires up multiple virtual browser envs (vitest, jest, jsdom) to run the tests in parallel. Stuttering and low responsiveness during the execution, but would complete in 3-4 minutes - it takes around 1 minutes on my current M4 MBP.
The gap in spec is no mistake, if it was appealing enough for existing air-book users to downgrade it would cannibalise their bottomline.
The budget tier is UTM. (Also recommend any users of UTM that find it useful should consider donating, preferably through Github sponsors.)
You might argue that some tools like terminal emulator or text editor might be necessary to solve some basic OS issues, but these tools should be extremely simple, like notepad.exe (old one!) or cmd.exe.
Anything other should be distributed in application store or any other way but not as a part of base operating system.
Nor Windows not macOS suits me for that definition, at least their default distributions (I'm pretty sure that it's possible for Apple or Microsoft to build bare bones operating system distribution, but so far they didn't bother and I won't accept some unsupported third party modifications). Linux somewhat suits me, as I can build something with little effort. It'll still contain lots of stuff I have no idea about, but these tend to not show up loudly.
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).
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.
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...
- It has ~1.5x the screen real-estate (2408x1506 vs 1920x1200)
- The CPU is (3566,8646) compared to the AMD (2366,9243) on geek bench. Single core (the most important) is ~1.5x faster
- PC's battery life is 8-10 hours real-world (rather than quoted "up to 13"), Toms Hardware benchmarked the Neo at 13.5
- Neo is slightly lighter at 2.7 vs ~3.1 lbs.
There are other reasons to go with the AMD version, larger storage, touchscreen if that's your thing, some people might even like Windows 11.
But the Neo is still going to be a runaway hit.
(source: https://youtu.be/3ZTe5kUYt9k?t=702)
- Screen real estate does not equal resolution. Nobody is going to scale their MacBook Neo's smaller 13" screen down to take advantage of those pixels. I.e., if I have a 10 inch 8K screen that’s not really “more screen real estate” than a 27” 4K screen in practice. So the real question is whether the $500-800 user is a pixel hunter and loves smoother text at the expense of other purchase factors. IMO, macOS has weird resolutions like this because it sucks at scaling (e.g., 27" 4K monitors look worse in macOS than on Windows, which is why Apple goes with 5K)
- Yoga 7 video playback on battery actually beats the Neo at almost 17 hours.
(source: https://youtu.be/3ZTe5kUYt9k?t=726
- Yoga 7 office productivity rundown is very close at 10 hours 54 minutes, I don't think anyone is going to be upset at that coming slightly behind the MacBook Air:
https://youtu.be/3ZTe5kUYt9k?t=753
- 2.7 vs 3.1 pounds is insignificant, not worth losing half your RAM over
The price? Yes the Lenovo is better but it's also $950.
I don't think anyone but the pickiest pixel hunters are going to mind the difference, and they'll enjoy the benefits of OLED like vastly improved contrast, HDR capability, and higher peak brightness than the Neo.
https://www.bestbuy.com/product/lenovo-yoga-7-2-in-1-copilot...
"As of 2026, the world population is approximately 8.3 billion." [1]
The PC gaming market alone is 9x larger than the Mac's install base.
https://www.spyhunter.com/shm/macos-stats/
That means a LOT of students who the MacBook Neo appeals to will cross it off their list for the mere fact that they can’t play things like Counter Strike 2/CS:Go on it.
If I was a student today and only had $700 budget for all my equipment I’d probably end up with a previous generation Lenovo LOQ with the RTX 4050 or a current generation Acer Nitro with the RTX 5050. These laptops are thicker and heavier but they get decent battery life on integrated graphics for school work, then when I get back to my dorm I could play popular gaming titles without buying a separate game console.
I’m sure the Neo will sell well and increase Apple’s market share, but this idea that it’s a market-changing disruptive device is an exaggeration. The #1 laptop manufacturer in the world is Lenovo, who sells nearly 3x as many systems as Apple, who is in 4th place.
I think it will actually be quite trivial for manufacturers like Lenovo to respond and make their own similar model.
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.
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).
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?
As a data point: I got a 14" MacBook Pro with a 512 GB SSD the first day it was available in 2021, and I've used it daily since then.
According to the SMART data ("smartctl -x /dev/disk0"), the SSD "percentage used" is 7%, with ~200 TBW. At this rate, the laptop will probably outlive me.
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 sibling comments mentioning endurance don't tell the complete story either; continuously writing a drive until it shows errors means the cells have become leaky enough that they can't even hold data between each write and verify pass (hours or minutes apart), and while people point to such studies as "proof" that NAND endurance isn't something to worry about, they forget that endurance and retention are inversely related, as with temperature, and this is a statistical effect, so the true specification is more like "X years/months at temperature T after Y cycles with a BER of Z"; each one of those variables can be adjusted to make the others look as good or bad as you want.
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...
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...
2000s SLC flash: 100K cycles
Modern SLC/pSLC flash: 30-60K cycles
2010s MLC flash: 5-10K cycles
Modern QLC flash: 300-500 cycles
...and I won't even get into the details of their retention characteristics, suffice to say they subtly redefined them over the years to make the newer numbers better than they really are.
brew install wine-stable
or package any windows app with your own environment:
brew install --cask Sikarugir-App/sikarugir/sikarugir
The sheer amount of useless nonsense that must be in memory.
I’ve got that one and I’m yet to feel limited.
Hardware is mostly worse, but that’s to be expected for the price. And nothing terrible, just little cuts all over.
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.
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.
And no, not a "slow edition" like we have today: https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2024/07/apples-restrictions-h...
It's not surprising that it can run anything a 8GB M1 could... Geez...
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.
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.
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.
Also: https://getutm.app/
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.
This is them confirming that the CPU has enough virtualization support that they can virtualize rather than emulate the guest OS
> 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
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.
It would explain why they picked such an arbitrary number of cores.
Unfortunately, the performance is very poor due to Apple restrictions on iOS.
Are they arbitrary restrictions Apple puts on them to prevent this kind of thong?
See the UTM iOS installation documentation for more information: https://docs.getutm.app/installation/ios/
It doesn't work well - probably not at all for a modern version of Windows - but the tools exist.
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.
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.
They do already, my work laptop runs the corporate spin of Ubuntu, complete with Crowdstrike, which goes absolutely crazy and chews all the CPU whenever I do a Yocto build.
Not nine different/only somewhat overlapping pieces of software from companies that were competitors. Nine equivalent products. I guess defender made ten.
Except they were unusably slow. Literally.
Log in when class starts, you may get control after 10+ minutes. Opening a web browser was a mistake you may not live to regret.
The network there was not fast. The various security stuff slowed every computer down a lot.
I suspect they were already older and maybe underspec. Probably had 4200 RPM disks or something.
But the combination meant they were 100% worthless.
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?
The LTSC IoT releases are easy to find (wink-wink) and don't have 80% of the annoyances, including constant "feature upgrades" - still not Linux, but better than consumer Windows.
If your Explorer context menu is taking more than a split second to load, there's something wrong with your hardware.
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.
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.
They are more incentivized by that than the few lost sales from people who know better to look for low crud machines.
And on more expensive machines they’d just be leaving money on the table. So they still often ship bundled crud.
Similar to spyware on TVs. Margins are razor thin. They’re going to make them up somewhere.
Like, the UI shows my hovers and interactions live but clicking things just takes time to do the corresponding result.
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 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.
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.
My home laptop is even faster.
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.
Also it isn't 2-3x faster, stop with the made up nonsense please. Just checked and my 3 year old AMD laptop is on par with the NEO geekbench score I found online (slower in single core but faster in multi core), not 2-3x slower.
The best Windows laptop you can buy is still a MacBook.