I just bought a used 2019 16" Macbook pro. It seems M Series won't get native support in parallels for Windows 10 or Windows Server 2022. I'm sure you could hack it but I like to use a system that is easy to understand.

I can not run windows 11. I felt dirty giving it access to my Mac partition when I had a M1 Air.

The 2019 16" intel battery life is either great or crap depending on load. I pulled about 17 hours playing music in VLC with minimum brightness and low as 5 hours while doing actual work. The lowest wattage I've seen is around 4W on the intel while 1.2W on the M1 (screen off).

For consumers though, the M series chips are pretty darn good.

Aside: I use Parallels with Windows 11 and Ubuntu on my M1 MBP and I love this approach to computing where you just spin up VMs and delete them when you're done with them.

It almost feels silly polluting my system macOS install with things like Homebrew and top-level applications and personal/sensitive information when I could have a VM for each project, each game, each cryptocurrency wallet, and a general one for personal entertainment.

It's also the logical conclusion for Python version management. ;)

> It seems M Series won't get native support in parallels for Windows 10 or Windows Server 2022.

This seems to be a hole left from Apple’s move away from Intel. I’m part of the niche group of people running Windows on Mac (via VMWare Fusion & Parallels). We’ve been buying Macs for 10 years now and suddenly we don’t have a path forward with new Apple hardware.

We’re currently deciding between changing our development stack to not require Windows or to just move away from Apple.

Parallels has native support for Windows 11 on M-series chips.

Some games like Crusader Kings 3 are even faster in Windows 11 on Parallels than on native macOS.

Wait, so what are we talking about here? Support for older windows through the Rosetta translation layer through parallels? Or is this talking about only older windows (I.e. windows 10) through the arm-specific windows versions?

Windows 11 ARM can be run on M1 through parallels. Windows 11 ARM can run x64/x86 (either?) software. So there’s a path. Performance of the translation layer is not great though.

ARM64 Windows with Windows own built in x86/x64 compatibility layer.

It actually runs very well, even on my base model M1 Mac Mini.

Our root issue is Microsoft SQL Server refusing to install on Windows 11 ARM. If it did, we'd happily move to Windows 11.

I really want to spend my (rather than my employer's) money on a personal macbook, but the fact that they have 8GB of ram as a starter and upgrading it costs hundreds of $ (an amount that can easily buy you 64GBs of high performing ram) is what keeps me off it.

I would feel genuinely fooled to pay such an absurd amount of money for more ram when I had a MBP with 16GB of memory 10 years ago.

Hell, even my 2 years old OnePlus 11 smartphone has 16GB of rams and the cost of the phone was pretty much equal to the cost of upgrading from 8 to 16gb a macbook air.

Does it really matter how much upgrades cost? Just spec the machine you want and see if it's within your budget/willing to pay for it.

I'm on year 3 of my M1 Air 8gb and it's still perfect. My previous two personal Macbook pros were all 8 gig models.

Just because I can afford something it does not imply I'm willing to condone and vote with my wallet such practices.

Knuckling under to onerous pricing undermines consumers' ability to vote with their wallets.

That's correct. I think we should celebrate consumers that refuse to fork out high prices. They put pricing pressures that benefits everyone.

Every Apple product post reliably brings this same tiresome comment. Most people don’t need more than 8GB for browsing and office work. The memory upgrade prices are competitive with high-end Lenovo and Surface laptops. However, if you don’t like it then just ~buy another computer~. What is the point of this constant complaining?

> Every Apple product post reliably brings this same tiresome comment. Most people don’t need (...)

Why are you trying to argue that the baseline specs from 10 years ago are somehow still acceptable today in supposedly high-end product lines?

I can buy a miniPC for 300€ and stick 32GB of RAM in it. Why are you arguing that this is absurd in MacBooks?

This takes corporate worship to another level.

> The memory upgrade prices are competitive with high-end Lenovo and Surface laptops.

Bullshit. They even solder components just to prevent people from actually avoiding price gouging.

You're being willfuly obtuse. Lenovo X1 charges $170 to go from 8GB to 16GB. Surface Pro 9 charges $200. Apple M2 charges $200. All of these laptops use soldered memory. They all start at 8GB. Apple only has 15% market share in the US. So what's the problem? Enjoy using your loaded miniPC at a coffee shop.

The only models in the X1 lineup that even offer 8GB RAM are the previous generation. The latest X1 Carbon starts at 16.

> Lenovo X1 charges $170 to go from 8GB to 16GB.

I have a Beelink miniPC that takes $70 to upgrade to 32BG of RAM, and that involves buying 2*16GB of RAM.

That's 1/3 the cost to get twice the memory you mention in your case.

There is no way around it.

Will we see another generation of 8gb/256ssds?

Where the 8gb means you'll be making massive, unprecedented writes to your SSD due to aggressive swap usage when just web browsing (my m1 air wrote approx 1 TB/day for a week until I returned mine), and a smaller ssd to wear out even faster?

Will the aggressive sabotage of their products (forced obselescence) continue?

This is my biggest beef with their lineup as well. The markup in memory pricing is beyond depressing and I'm not opening my wallet, at best, my employer's.

I understood PP's concern to be about excessive flash wear due to swapping rather than tiered memory pricing.

Regardless, "markup" probably isn't the right word, since Apple is the supplier of its own SIPs.

DIMMs would likely be cheaper to the end user per gigabyte (and possibly upgradable!) but it's not really an apples-to-apples comparison vs. in-package memory.

Flash storage is perhaps a better comparison and it certainly isn't cheap, but you can easily add fast Thunderbolt storage.

It wasn't much different when they were using standard DIMMs, to my recollection.

Wasn't that buggy reporting which Apple fixed?

https://www.macworld.com/article/334275/apple-silicon-m1-mac...

I got my m1 air the day it launched in Nov 20 and it's almost to 3 years and going strong. Really hoping m3 goes to 16 so can upgrade

Thanks for bringing up the SSD problems plaguing MacBooks.

From Apple's discussion forum.

"If Mac M1’s built-in SSD died" - 2020

https://discussions.apple.com/thread/252658125