Despite hardware limits, Parallels supports running Windows on MacBook Neo

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

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[Wtcher]

I can replace my anemic 2016 12" MacBook and the Wintel machine I keep around just to run Exact Audio Copy?

 

[Wtcher]

All of the discussions of the Neo mention that's it's good for "light weight computing" or words to that effect, but I think it's worth mentioning that while so called light weight computing has remain relatively fixed over the last 10-15 years (web browsing, streaming content, email, office productivity apps, a little audio or video editing, photo editing and management, etc) computational power has skyrocketed (particularly on the Mac). Which is to say, for the vast majority of things that most people do with a laptop, the Neo isn't compromised at all. Not, "accept compromises to spend less", not "OK till it's really really not", but not ever. The chip and memory in the Neo outperform top of the line machines from just a few years ago, and the fact is in that few years the needs of the average user really haven't changed. It's not like everyone has taken to doing a lot of 4k video editing and running simulations and manipulating billion polygon 3D models-- they're still just doing the list of things above. Saying "its good if you just need to do x but if you also need to do y you should consider stepping up" is true of every computer made save the top 1%, and in the Neo's case x is pretty much everything that most people do.

Generally true, I generally agree. However I think the applications people are running to access those things (e.g. web browsers), and the content themselves (e.g. the websites) have gotten fatter, and more demanding of clients.

That is, the websites aren't just pages with formatting anymore. Nowadays they're virtually applications themselves, with tons of JS, all sorts of libraries, and badly compressed media.

If nothing else, I know my iPhone 5s (which astoundingly did receive an update back in January) struggles (or outright fails) on sites it used to not -- due the combination of ancient browser, small amount of RAM (1GB?), and vintage CPU.

Anyway, I'm sure the Neo will be fine. 8GB is sufficient at present, and the AS GPU doesn't portion out dedicated memory so the Neo gets more control over it.

If it forces companies to actually optimize their software then... well... it still sucks but at least some good will come out of it.

I hope so. I imagine 9/10 people are just going to complain their computer is slow and they need a new one.