Despite hardware limits, Parallels supports running Windows on MacBook Neo

"8GB unified memory is the minimum practical configuration."

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[Teguh Aditya]

It seems you can run MacOS well, or you can run Windows well, just not both at the same time.

But can someone answer: if you buy an external TB drive, can you run Windows without using space on the internal drive? Or use both at different times, both using half of the terabyte? And both using minimal space on the internal drive?

Yes, you can. I have been using Parallels on my base model M1 Air (8/256) with the VM stored on my NVME to USB-c enclosure. Not the greatest experience, but it gets the job done for me.