IT House reported on March 7 that virtual machine software provider Parallels released a status update yesterday (March 6), stating that it has not yet confirmed whether Parallels Desktop software can run normally on Apple's MacBook Neo.
Parallels Desktop has always been committed to helping Mac users run virtual operating systems such as Windows smoothly. However, for this new Apple device, the official team cannot give an exact compatibility commitment at this stage. Users can currently regard this model as "not yet officially supported."
Officials revealed that the core reason for doubtful compatibility lies in the differences in the underlying hardware architecture. MacBook Neo is equipped with Apple's A18 Pro chip. Although this chip is also based on ARM architecture, it does not belong to the M-series chip family tailored for Mac computers.
Note from IT House: As a local Mac virtual machine management program, Parallels Desktop needs to directly call the macOS virtualization API that is deeply bound to the host chip architecture to drive the virtual machine.
On traditional Mac computers equipped with M-series chips, Parallels directly relies on the chip's built-in hardware virtualization support to run virtual machines based on the ARM architecture.
For new devices using the A18 Pro chip, the Parallels engineering team must first thoroughly verify whether the chip actually has the underlying hardware support features necessary to run virtual machines. Before drawing a final conclusion, the official team plans to conduct a comprehensive and detailed software and hardware adaptation test.
In addition to the hard threshold of chip architecture, device memory capacity will also significantly affect the user's actual experience. MacBook Neo is only equipped with 8GB of running memory. Although this will not directly determine whether the software is compatible, it will inevitably significantly limit the performance of running macOS and virtual machines at the same time.
