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Comment by Someone1234 | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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

> 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.

Sorry, I misread your post I can't edit it anymore and I should have read into your post and it was a knee jerk reaction on my part.

I honestly thought you were saying it was a novelty, though now I can see I misread/misunderstood.

I saw the other day people complaining about AI slop being posted on this site by new accounts - which I agree is bad.

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

I admit now after rereading that I did misrepresent what they said and I should have read their comment more closely and it was a knee jerk reaction and that its my fault.

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

I take it's repairability slightly differently. That's because it is highly modular, and I think the reason for that is longevity. They put a lot of engineering effort into this thing, and so at this price point that has to pay back over a lot of devices over a long period. This design isn't going to change for many years, but the internals will iterate independently.

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

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

Windows doesn't run "just fine" on 4 GiB of RAM. I had a laptop with 6; Windows 10 became barely usable. If you want to run one, small, program at a time I think you'll be ok. Forget about web browsing; you'll get one tab and it'll be slow.

Agreed. Windows 10/11 can run just fine on 4GB of RAM. You just can't run anything inside of Windows 10/11 with 4GB of RAM.

The last version of Windows that felt like 4GB of RAM was performant for me with applications was Windows XP. Not that every computer running the 32-bit edition of Windows XP could even see/utilize a full 4GB of RAM properly, but at least it was fast.

I found even Windows 7 ran very well with just 4GB of DDR2. I only upgraded to 8GB when I started testing Windows 8/8.1 on that rig.

Though I get by just fine with 512MB on my favorite Pentium 3 XP system. :D

I ran a Windows 7 system with 3GiB as a gaming machine and it was just fine. Windows 7... the last Windows release that was acceptable-ish. Memories...

My Windows 7 laptop had 4GB RAM and I played Crysis 2 on it. 4GB was absolutely enough for a performant system.

A lightweight Linux desktop can keep a decent amount of browser tabs (using Firefox; avoid Chrome) on 4GB RAM if you set up compressed RAM properly. It's not foolproof like 8GB would be, but it's absolutely fine for casual use.

HDD or SSD? SSD can effectively make up for SOME amount of less RAM due to faster swapping, in my experience.

2015 laptop, spinning rust. Nevertheless, it was at least somewhat acceptable at purchase, but crapware installed with successive system updates brought it to a standstill. An SSD might've helped, but not by much. I wiped it and put Kubuntu on it to give to my wife, for whom it ran acceptably. She gave it back when she got a shiny new MacBook Air.

> An SSD might've helped, but not by much.

A SSD would have made an absolutely massive difference.

Source: I have clients that still have 2nd/3rd gen i5 systems running 3-4 GB of RAM with Windows 10 and they're tolerable solely thanks to SSDs. Swapping that much on a hard drive would just be painful to use.

Nobody should be interactively using a computer post-2018ish (whenever SSDs fell below $1/GB) that's booting and running primary applications off spinning rust. They're perfectly fine for bulk storage drives but anyone waiting for an operating system booting off one has wasted enough of their life in the last year to have paid for the SSD. Companies that wouldn't spend $100 on an upgrade are literally throwing money away paying their employees to wait on a shit computer.

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

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.)

> 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.)

Let's see one of these $300 Windows laptops with 512GB of SSD (in a reasonable format, e.g. not an SD card), a body that isn't disposable, a screen that isn't a dim potato, a CPU that's within 20% of the Neo's performance, and a GPU that isn't embarrassed to be called a GPU.

I doubt they exist.

> I doubt they exist.

I think you're misunderstanding, of course they do not exist. People don't get $300 windows laptops for their performance, build quality, or anything similar. Nor do they care about screen brightness, and 256GB is fine for the use case which is running word or some other simple application for as little $$ as possible.

The implication in the comparison is that they’re similar. The similarity between a Neo and a $300 PC is that they can both boot up and run at least one program. That’s about where it ends.

They existed on AliExpress. Chuwis and the likes (though the latest ones are lying about the CPU model). You usually get nvme storage, not the very best of course but it does the job. And IPS display. It's overall ok stuff, but the memory crisis has pushed them above 300 now.. They usually run N150s.

I also got two N100 NUC like boxes with 16GB DDR4, 512GB NVMe for €115 each. Bought them as the memory crisis was starting. One is now my home assistant, the other one runs matrix.

I still use an ancient chuwi for going to the makerspace. It's still got hours of battery.

It's all ok stuff if you know what you're doing.

I went looking, and did find stuff on Amazon, though none were made of an aluminum chasis, and none had the geekbench score anywhere near, and none had the screen brightness.

As I write this, the top Amazon search for "windows laptop" is a

> Lenovo IdeaPad 15.6 inch Business Laptop with Microsoft 365 • 2026 Edition • Intel Core • Wi-Fi 6 • 1.1TB Storage (1TB OneDrive + 128GB SSD) • Windows 11

The person who approved describing its 128GB storage as 1.1TB should be hanged.

The CPU also has[0] 31% of the single core and 14% of the CPU Mark rating. The screen has 220 nits (vs 500) brightness, comes with 4GB of RAM, and weighs 30% more. At least it's half price, though.

The shopping situation for Windows laptops is utterly dire.

[0]https://www.cpubenchmark.net/compare/6268vs4227/Apple-A18-Pr...

I recently helped a friend ditch Windows for Linux on an 8GB budget laptop he had. It had win11 on it which could barely function with nothing running, kept swapping like crazy to it's anemic eMMC "SSD". Windows can't really run reasonably with 4GB of RAM. It will only technically boot.

Windows 11 on 4gb of ram? I doubt it unless they are in hell and that is their eternal torture.

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

Windows 7. Windows 10 eats about 6GB (custom IoT with a lot of things disabled).

Neo is a parody of a computer.

Neo is powered by a fast and battery-friendly chip. It's definitely not a novelty any more than Chromebooks or Windows 11 notebooks with integrated graphics have been.

lolwut?

check your install mate

Don't underestimate what you can do with the 8 GB RAM. My mid-tier, Intel 2019 Macbook Pro with 32GB RAM suddenly died by the end of 2023. I quickly got a basemodel 256GB/8GB MacMini M2 as a replacement. While initialy supposed to be a temporary replacement until my MBP gets fixed, I ended up using it for another year as my main daily machine for everything, inluding professionally (fullstack software dev).

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.

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

Because I was fed up with parallels subscription model and they make me pay for the upgrade the non-subscription version with every new macOS release, I dropped parallels for UTM. I barely need windows, only every other month or so and often just for some small tasks. UTM is nice, but performance running windows is waaay below parallels. It is free, however, so I won't complain.

The performance story doesn't really make sense as both UTM and Parallels use Apple Hypervisor Kit which pretty much is the hypervisor running Windows. It should be identical.

Classic VM solutions like Virtualbox, VMware, Parallels etc. always come with guest tools and driver packages for the guest that have a massive impact on performance. Just because both solutions use the same hypervisor doesn’t mean they perform equally.

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

fair

I have Intent working on it. Maybe AI can make progress on this, but we will see.

Intent looks interesting but the fact that they have their own credits system turns me off of it. I pay $200/mo for Claude Code and that's enough for me; I wish I could use Intent with that.

Have you actually tried it? In addition to Augment, you can use it Claude Code, Codex, OpenCode and more are coming.

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 take this back: UTM has Venus in there with KosmicKrisp – the works, as of January. Long live QEMU.

There’s something called menu pricing, in order to keep its existing customer base buying their more expensive higher end models there need to be an unjustifiable drop in quality to switch.

The gap in spec is no mistake, if it was appealing enough for existing air-book users to downgrade it would cannibalise their bottomline.

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

That being said, Parallels may need to review its licensing with a budget tier in mind.

The budget tier is UTM. (Also recommend any users of UTM that find it useful should consider donating, preferably through Github sponsors.)

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