Art 12 ↔ Art 19 — Privacy (Article 12) is subordinated to ad-supported business model enabling broad information access (Article 19); extensive tracking enables free content distribution but conflicts with privacy rights.

Tagbert 2026-03-13 15:23 UTC link

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.

joe_mamba 2026-03-13 15:24 UTC link

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.

j45 2026-03-13 15:46 UTC link

If Parallels can run it, UTM likely can run a fair bit too.

donatj 2026-03-13 15:47 UTC link

Was that in doubt?

enopod_ 2026-03-13 16:08 UTC link

Can it run Linux?

Someone1234 2026-03-13 16:53 UTC link

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 2026-03-13 17:12 UTC link

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.

Kwpolska 2026-03-13 19:07 UTC link

> Windows 11 VM requires a minimum of 4GB of RAM to function

You can give it less. It may refuse to install, but even without using any workarounds, you can change the assigned RAM after installing and it will not refuse to boot. The minimum for Windows Server 2025 is 2 GB, and it’s basically the same OS (just with less bloat).

giancarlostoro 2026-03-13 20:09 UTC link

So in other words... We COULD in theory run Windows on our iPhones.

roody15 2026-03-13 20:54 UTC link

MacBook Neo is going to sell like crazy. In the education market, educators, students, aides... nothing close at this price point. With memory and SSD prices so high I don't see how Dell, Asus and others are going to be able to compete. Unless the build quality is significantly worse than a M1 macbook air not sure budget PC makers will be able to compete.

dana321 2026-03-13 21:31 UTC link

Not many people know this, but you can use wine on macos.

brew install wine-stable

or package any windows app with your own environment:

brew install --cask Sikarugir-App/sikarugir/sikarugir

robmccoll 2026-03-13 22:09 UTC link

I sometimes run Xubuntu on my phone via termux and proot. The hardware we carry around in our pockets is ridiculously capable.

thelastgallon 2026-03-14 01:10 UTC link

Apple is moving into Google's territory, cheap Chromebooks. The right move for Google is to aggressively move forward with their desktop OS and launch their line of laptops. The first pixel laptops had the best keyboards and trackpads ever. Google can nail this if they have the right product person. Apple needs some competition and the legacy PC makers won't cut it. Once again, it has to be Apple vs Google, same as Android vs iOS devices.

econ 2026-03-14 02:29 UTC link

This is actually hilarious, the OSes are so bloated GBs of ram isn't enough to fit two.

The sheer amount of useless nonsense that must be in memory.

neonstatic 2026-03-14 03:25 UTC link

I have mixed feelings about Parallels. On one hand, it's good to be able to run a Windows VM, that generally works and is usable. On the other hand, in my niche that became a lazy vendor's equivalent of "we support MacOS".

coldtea 2026-03-14 04:32 UTC link

It's a computer. CPU wise is about a slightly better M1 - which even today is quite a beast.

It's not surprising that it can run anything a 8GB M1 could... Geez...

serf 2026-03-14 06:01 UTC link

a VM host with a windows guest and a total of 8gb of ram?

Yeah you'll get the OS to run, the magic there is making either environment usable.

Might be great for some web dev that needs to see what their work looks like elsewhere -- but even then imagining a modern Windows install w/ AI add-ins, local search caching and update deltas then running firefox or chrome with 4 gb of memory sort of makes me cringe.

Godspeed, I guess. Some of the best works of art were made with very serious constraints, but I don't have that kind of time anymore.

nelsonic 2026-03-14 07:28 UTC link

Genuine question: who would buy a MacBook Neo to run Windows on it…? Surely people buying Neo are trying to escape MicroSlop?!

evanjrowley 2026-03-14 16:55 UTC link

Apple, please give us this capability on the iPhone/iPad, then watch your competitor Microsoft burn faster.

And no, not a "slow edition" like we have today: https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2024/07/apples-restrictions-h...

jnaina 2026-03-15 05:03 UTC link

apple is basically a services company pretending to be a hardware company.

Its services business runs at roughly 75% gross margin, while hardware sits around 36 to 37%. That tells you where the real money is.

in many ways, all the Apple devices exist to feed the services engine. The hardware pulls people into the ecosystem, and the services generate the profits.

the Neo is probably a bit of a loss leader. Once you factor in manufacturing tooling capex, distribution, shipping, marketing, and all the other costs, Apple is likely not making much on the device itself. But every new Neo buyer who enters the Apple ecosystem will probably spend at least $50 or more on Apple services (icloud, music, movies, apps, etc) over time. (i have several friends who are buying neo as their personal content consumption device, abandoning their current ipads)

my estimate (which is why i'm still holding aapl): Services hits roughly $275-300B by FY2035, representing about 35-40% of Apple's total revenue (up from 26% today), with gross margins staying in the 74-76% range. At that point, Services alone would generate more gross profit than the entire company does today. that is where the real payoff comes from.

aruametello 2026-03-13 15:36 UTC link

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...

havaloc 2026-03-13 15:36 UTC link

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).

crazysim 2026-03-13 15:49 UTC link

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.

xeromal 2026-03-13 15:50 UTC link

It uses the iphone processor (which I think still might be one of those Mchips?) so I think it was ok to be unsure.

kace91 2026-03-13 16:00 UTC link

Isn’t basically m1 air equivalent in specs?

I’ve got that one and I’m yet to feel limited.

jagged-chisel 2026-03-13 16:14 UTC link

In a VM, definitely. Just like other Macs.

gruez 2026-03-13 16:22 UTC link

>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.

I thought wear leveling worked at the page/block level, not the chip level? On an SSD, if there was a failure of an entire chip, you're still screwed.

Aurornis 2026-03-13 16:41 UTC link

Virtualization requires specific hardware support to be performant. There are ways to do complete software emulation of a virtual machine but it would be so slow that nobody would want to use it.

This is them confirming that the CPU has enough virtualization support that they can virtualize rather than emulate the guest OS

conradev 2026-03-13 18:16 UTC link

VMWare Fusion is free, even if it is a pain in the butt to download. It also has GPU paravirtualization for Linux/Windows which is the only reason I use a proprietary VMM on macOS these days.

Asmod4n 2026-03-13 18:22 UTC link

Apple already sells that, it’s called MacBook Air.

zitterbewegung 2026-03-13 18:33 UTC link

This isn't a novelty it will crush the low end of the PC market. No one cares if the next iteration will be better with 12GB of ram. The workloads that people say that 8GB can't handle will be ones that the actual users will either wait or tolerate. I've been noticing that people who review the Macbook Neo basically don't get the point [1] and just the headline of this article matters that VMs work and thats a big win. The most ridicuous thing about the laptop is that it appears to be reparable which sort of tells me this is a template similar to the M1 Air of the future laptop designs that Apple will come out with. [2]

[1] https://samhenri.gold/blog/20260312-this-is-not-the-computer...

[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PbPCGqoBB4Y

vbezhenar 2026-03-13 18:52 UTC link

MacOS has always been incredibly bloated.

alwillis 2026-03-13 19:09 UTC link

Yes; macOS has native container support for Linux [1].

[1]: https://github.com/apple/container

alwillis 2026-03-13 19:38 UTC link

I wrote about how Unified Memory, SSD directly attached to the SoC and Apple's use of real-time compression saves memory, reduces power consumption and wear on SSDs [1].

[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47354705

bram98 2026-03-13 19:39 UTC link

In a vm, I don't see why not.

foldr 2026-03-13 19:58 UTC link

The M2 MacBook Air base model has 8GB RAM and a single 256GB NAND chip. Nearly 4 years later, it doesn't seem to have caused any problems.

paxys 2026-03-13 20:09 UTC link

In theory you can run any software on any hardware.

nextos 2026-03-13 21:40 UTC link

In the US, cheap ThinkPads like E14 sometimes sell for a bit less when you factor in all typical discounts. They are good machines that run Linux well and can be repaired.

In EU, and I imagine other markets, there's nothing remotely close. I hope this puts some pressure on Lenovo and the rest of manufacturers to be more competitive.

layer8 2026-03-13 21:42 UTC link

It was already demonstrated in practice: https://www.xda-developers.com/tiny11-dev-windows-11-iphone-...

Also: https://getutm.app/

happymellon 2026-03-13 22:15 UTC link

We had WinCE. No thanks.

jaredcwhite 2026-03-13 22:46 UTC link

As others have said, should be fine to run Linux in a VM. Running natively from boot, the only potential option would be Asahi Linux, but my understanding is that the A18 Pro chip has certain internal attributes which are akin to an M3, and Asahi has only gotten full support in place for the M1/M2 generations. Perhaps once they get M3+ fully working, A18 Pro would also be an option. (I'm also super interested in a Neo running Linux.)

wolpoli 2026-03-13 22:50 UTC link

PC makers are going to stop some of the artificial segmentation they used on the lower price devices, and that is going to hurt the sales of their higher-end lines. There is no reason they kept pushing 70 percent srgb panels on even the mid tier Thinkpads when the Neo has a good display.

littlecranky67 2026-03-13 22:59 UTC link

Don't underestimate what you can do with the 8 GB RAM. My mid-tier, Intel 2019 Macbook Pro with 32GB RAM suddenly died by the end of 2023. I quickly got a basemodel 256GB/8GB MacMini M2 as a replacement. While initialy supposed to be a temporary replacement until my MBP gets fixed, I ended up using it for another year as my main daily machine for everything, inluding professionally (fullstack software dev).

There was simply no need to upgrade, the MacMini was faster in all regards then my Intel MBP. Out of curiosity of its capability I wanted to see how gaming performs - I ended up playing through all three Tomb Raider reboots (Mac native, but using Rosetta!) at 1080p in high settings. Absolutely amazed how fast it was (mostly driven by the update to M2).

Only one thing ever made me notice the lack of RAM, and that was when I was running the entire test suite of our frontend monorepo. This runs concurrently and fires up multiple virtual browser envs (vitest, jest, jsdom) to run the tests in parallel. Stuttering and low responsiveness during the execution, but would complete in 3-4 minutes - it takes around 1 minutes on my current M4 MBP.

int_19h 2026-03-13 23:04 UTC link

Lima is more or less the equivalent of WSL for Macs.

https://lima-vm.io

akst 2026-03-13 23:04 UTC link

There’s something called menu pricing, in order to keep its existing customer base buying their more expensive higher end models there need to be an unjustifiable drop in quality to switch.

The gap in spec is no mistake, if it was appealing enough for existing air-book users to downgrade it would cannibalise their bottomline.

auggierose 2026-03-13 23:45 UTC link

I don't know. Both of my macs are over 7 years old, and have at least 32GB of RAM. Certainly would not buy an 8GB one now.

lubujackson 2026-03-14 00:01 UTC link

This is Apple's "Nintendo moment" when they realize they can package old hardware and win on polish and ecosystem.

materielle 2026-03-14 01:13 UTC link

What’s actually going to happen is the second they start to lose market share or struggle at all, they will cancel everything Chromebook related and give up.

With that said, I think Chromebook’s still hold a competitive advantage for public school contracts. It doesn’t matter that the Neo is pretty cheap and the best value. Contracts are signed based on what’s cheapest, period.

Also, a big blind spot for a lot of HN: this is going to be big in developing Markets. This is within budget for middle class Latin Americans in a way that even the Air isn’t.

dangus 2026-03-14 01:29 UTC link

I think this is somewhat ignorant the wide variety of legitimately very decent Windows PC laptops available in the exact same $500-700 price range as the MacBook Neo.

Apple isn’t disrupting the industry here. Don’t buy into early influencer review hype. These reviewers don’t actually look at retail store pricing.

Apple is just making a decision to go downmarket and making many of the same compromises as other cheap laptops, and some odd compromises that are unique to Apple’s machine:

No haptic trackpad, no keyboard backlight, no Touch ID on the cheap model, lower-end screen, very small battery, tiny slow charger included, minimal and performance compromised I/O, below-par RAM, worse speakers/microphones, an old nothing-special processor.

This is the exact same stuff that people have complained about for years with cheap laptops.

The fact that the computer is made of aluminum is really a distraction from these facts.

This idea that it’s Google versus Apple all over again is just not true. Windows is the dominant OS in the laptop space by far. Over 900 billion people in the world play PC games on windows, for example.

If you look at Best Buy street pricing, what Apple has pulled off here is not that impressive.

Let’s say you want the top end Neo model at $699. Spend $100 more at Best Buy and you’ll end up with a Yoga 7 machine with double the RAM, double the storage (1TB), 70Whr battery, and a very capable and efficient AMD Ryzen 7 AI 350 chip that has faster multicore and same or faster graphics performance.

You’ll gain user-replaceable SSD, backlit keyboard, convertible OLED touch screen, digital pen support, more and faster USB ports, microSD slot, HDMI port, fast charger in the box, better speakers, WiFi 7, bigger screen in a more popular 14” size…it’s a better buy that will last years longer for only a slight price increase (or, spend less on the Ryzen 5 AI 340 variant ($680) if you’re okay with compromising GPU performance, which most people in this category are, and you’ll still end up with double the RAM of the Neo and 512GB storage at $20 less than Apple’s non-education store price)

Seriously, give me a good reason to buy a Neo over a machine like this. What is actually better about the Mac objectively? https://www.bestbuy.com/product/lenovo-yoga-7-2-in-1-copilot...

mikkupikku 2026-03-14 01:34 UTC link

Apple won't give a shit, they'll trash the UX on old/cheap hardware knowing that their fanboys will shame anybody who complains for being too poor to upgrade. They've done it many times before. Ruined font rendering on all macs with standard DPI screens for instance.

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