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Tom’s Guide
Tom’s Guide
Technology
Tony Polanco

Can the MacBook Neo run Windows 11? Yes, but there's a huge catch

Windows Mac Tom Guide Parallels
MacBook Neo running Windows 11.

The MacBook Neo is a surprisingly capable laptop for its price. Starting at $599, Apple’s most affordable MacBook has specs comparable to the best iPhones thanks to its A18 Pro chip, 8GB of unified memory (RAM), and 256GB of storage. You won’t get the same performance as the new MacBook Air M5 or MacBook Pro M5, but this laptop is good for the basics.

Our friends at TechRadar recently posted a story about using Parallels to run Windows on the MacBook Neo, which is an interesting experiment to say the least. That inspired us to perform our own benchmark tests to see if running Windows 11 as a virtual machine on a MacBook Neo is worthwhile. Without spoiling the results, I’m not at all surprised. So, can the MacBook Neo serve as a Windows laptop replacement? Read on to find out!

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