ChamomileTea
macrumors member
If people:
1st: know about it
2nd: can get through the convoluted Broadcom site to download it
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Parallels Confirms MacBook Neo Can Run Windows in a Virtual Machine
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1st: know about it
2nd: can get through the convoluted Broadcom site to download it
Edgecrusherr
macrumors 6502a
Edit: I had mentioned the Homebrew method, but it stopped working last year. It's been a while since I had tried it! We are stuck with that convoluted Broadcom site. I do have the installer saved somewhere on my NAS though. I did that before Broadcom made it harder to get to.
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Enlightened Doggo
macrumors 6502
Macs are a lot more usable with low physical RAM than people realize. Just make sure you upgrade the SSD.
BriceApp
macrumors 6502a
I use VMware Fusion to run Win 11 on my M1 MBA which has 8gb of ram and 512gb of storage. I allocate 4gb of ram to windows and it runs just fine. I use it for legacy apps and using bitlocker drives. As a long time windows user it helps with the transition to Mac and being able to have the best of both worlds.
I was quite surprised one day when I had the VM running and ran a little test to open more apps and webpages on the Mac side than I would ever do at one time. Everything was a little slower but was still very much usable.
I was quite surprised one day when I had the VM running and ran a little test to open more apps and webpages on the Mac side than I would ever do at one time. Everything was a little slower but was still very much usable.
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Because they want a Mac but have this one annoying bit of software that needs Windows.
No need to stretch your imagination: https://getutm.app/
Well, Apple could have decided to disable the hypervisor framework if they didn't think it was going to give a good experience on the Neo.
Also, the last iPhone-processor-based Mac - the A12Z Developer Transition Kit - couldn't run the hypervisor framework on which Parallels etc. for ARM depend. Modern processors have instruction set features to accelerate virtualization. If the A18Pro was going to have some serious limitation c.f. the M-series, that would have been a top guess.
Non-Euclidean
macrumors 6502a
WarmWinterHat
Suspended
I have a Windows-only diagnostic tool for my car, too; Ross-Tech VCDS, if you're curious. It's USB and works just fine in a Windows VM on my Mac. It doesn't need 3rd-party drivers since it shows up as a COM serial device.
i give my Windows 11 ARM VM 4gb ram. It's more than enough for what it does.
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raythompsontn
macrumors 65816
There is software I need that will only run on Windows. I wanted an Apple laptop.
I ran two VMs in 16GB, just not at the same time. W11 Pro and Linux. They seemed to run OK even with other Mac apps active.
sracer
macrumors G4
Same here. 👍
I run Win 11 VM with UTM on my 8GB M2 Mac Mini to run some esoteric Windows apps, including desktop software for the Casio PocketViewer. I'm impressed with how well it all runs including recognizing a serial port-to-usb adapter.
WarmWinterHat
Suspended
Not if you need to physically connect it to anything, like in my case (USB device).
Biggest reason I use windows on my Mac is for Visual Studio for .NET development. VS Code is nice but lacks in features and Rider I haven’t used before. I’m just comfy with VS.
johannnn
macrumors 68030
Not true at all. macOS can use plenty of gigabytes from the SSD as RAM. Today's SSD drives are plenty fast for regular people to be ok with using that as RAM. So "which leaves only 4GB for macOS and Mac apps" is not true.
Why not? I have plenty of Mac friends that need to run e.g. Excel macros or an Excel plugin. It's totally fine just booting Windows up and doing that task and then shutting Windows down.
I do it plenty of times daily on my corporate iMac 2017 even.
The MacBook Neo comes with 8GB of RAM (Apple doesn't offer a memory upgrade option) and a Windows 11 VM requires a minimum of 4GB of RAM to function, which leaves only 4GB for macOS and Mac apps simultaneously.
No, you can get by with half if your needs are modest.
I had a Windows 10 VM which had 1 vCPU and 1.5 Gb of RAM. When this VM was upgraded to Windows 11 it became a little sluggish, so I gave it still 1 vCPU and 2 Gb of RAM.
Works wonderfully.
I use it for an old Eclipse-based IDE and some old enterprise software which can be disk intesive.
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This. UTM is fantastic on Mac. I have also been using since I have "M" Macs, and it allows to get other OSes running very quickly, and for free, with open source code (it is a pretty nice front-end for QEMU).
To run Windows applications which doesn't exist for the Mac or perform badly, and in addition don't have a web version or work well from the web.
It's a I'm willing to spend $100 per year for Parallel license and some hassle to avoid using Windows as the main system" situation.
You should if you can reduce the RAM allocated. I run Windows 11 under Parallels and I only have 1 vCPU and 2Gb of RAM allocated.
Yeah so the MacBook Neo runs Parallels really well. It was one of the first programs I installed on my new machine and I haven't had any issues. Granted, I don't use it for gaming or other intense programs but I had it from being a student so I decided to try it out on the Neo and so far it runs very smoothly.