Despite hardware limits, Parallels supports running Windows on MacBook Neo

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

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[jhodge]

That's surprising. I tried running an Ubuntu VM using VMware on an M3 Macbook Air with 16 GB RAM, and it was slow as molasses. Typing was a pain because there was noticeable lag between keypress and appearance of the char.

Something was very wrong there. Not blaming you -- just quite sure that should have performed just fine.

 

[jhodge]

I'll give it another shot.

FWIW, instead of Parallels or VMware, you can also use UTM for free: https://mac.getutm.app

It doesn't deliver any deep integrations between host and guest, but it's more than good enough to validate compatibility and performance.

 

[jhodge]

It’s worth noting that Microsoft’s ARM to x86 translation engine (the equivalent to Rosetta 2) has gotten a lot better over the last several years, and that’s an important part of the viability of VMs both on the Neo and on Macs more broadly. You really can run useful x86 software on the ARM version of Windows, which essential since most apps don’t have ARM-native Windows versions.

And probably never will outside of the top 100 or so packages (commercial, OSS will probably be better). Unless MS drops x64 support, and that’s not happening.