Discussion
Parallels Confirms MacBook Neo Can Run Windows in a Virtual Machine
joe_mamba: 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.
havaloc: 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).
aruametello: 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spot in the durability of this device, but certainly it still could take a few years of abuse before anything breaks.an outdated study (2015) but inline with the "low end ssds" i mentioned.https://techreport.com/review/the-ssd-endurance-experiment-t...
donatj: Was that in doubt?
j45: If Parallels can run it, UTM likely can run a fair bit too.
bfrog: Funnily it probably runs Windows better than the typical corporate spyware burdened x86 laptop.
nazgulsenpai: Took 6 minutes from power button to login prompt this morning. Probably even longer from login responsive desktop. So yes, probably!
crazysim: 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.
nsxwolf: The first Apple Silicon developer boxes were Mac Minis with A series chips so I wouldn’t have expected any issues.
stackskipton: 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.
amluto: 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.
enopod_: Can it run Linux?
jagged-chisel: In a VM, definitely. Just like other Macs.
Tagbert: 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.
kace91: Isn’t basically m1 air equivalent in specs?I’ve got that one and I’m yet to feel limited.
xattt: 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.
xeromal: It uses the iphone processor (which I think still might be one of those Mchips?) so I think it was ok to be unsure.
jayd16: 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.
gruez: >Most flash has average wear out after 300k cyclesNo it doesn't. Most 1TB drives are rated for around 600 TBW, so 600 cycles, nowhere near 300k. 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...
bryanlarsen: 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.
hu3: Native, no. That would cannibalise Apple services which is a huge source of revenue for them.
abnercoimbre: Always excited to hear about fellow M1 users. I’m not limited in the slightest. 5-6 years strong now?
seabass-salmon: that doesn't maths
crazysim: That's why I chose to specifically mention production. The developer boxes were to get macOS native stuff going but virtualization was not a priority.
Aurornis: 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.
stuxnet79: 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.
joe_mamba: >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?
randomfrogs: If swapping was causing SSDs to fail on M1 Macs, we would never see the end of the hysterical articles about "NANDgate". Since we haven't seen any in all these years, it's seems pretty certain it's not happening.
joe_mamba: Hysteria would be if all had an issue like the keyboard gate, but this isn't an issue, it's a design limitation for certain uses cases which not everyone has. Some users will wear out faster than others due to usage patterns. If their M1 dies after 6 years of heavy usage, do you think they'll investigate if it was the NAND that died and go online to tell the news, or will they chuck it and buy new one?NAND is still the same wearable part that regular X64 laptops have, Apple doesn't use some magic industrial grade parts but same dies that Samsung, Micron and SK ship to X64 OEMS, and those are replaceable for a reason, because they eventually fail.
bydo: The A12Z in the developer transition kit didn't support hardware virtualization.
bloudermilk: 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…
Someone1234: 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.
JSR_FDED: 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.
the_real_cher: does that mean since this is the iPhone 16 cpu, by proxy the iPhone 16 can also run Windows in a virtual machine?
bombcar: 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.
the_real_cher: Thats pretty cool.
