By Abid Ahsan Shanto
Publication Date: 2026-04-12 06:53:00
The MacBook Neo is a new value-focused laptop, but unlike other laptops that Apple offers, this one comes with a mobile SoC. It’s a specific version of the Apple A18 Pro, which is the same chipset that powers the iPhone 16 Pro series. While many thought this processor would hold the system back, especially since it’s running MacOS, benchmarks and real-life performance prove the opposite.
Even when handling MacOS games, the A18 SoC inside the MacBook Neo (available on Amazon) holds surprisingly well. To make things a bit more interesting, ETA Prime has tested Windows 11 on the system, and things turned out to be better than expected.
ETA Prime relied on a virtualization app called Parallels Desktop for this test, and while UTM and VMware Fusion are free alternatives, the YouTuber wasn’t happy with the performance coming from them. It’s also worth noting that Windows 11 ARM was tested via the application, meaning there’s no x86 conversion when running native Windows-on-ARM apps.
Most low-to-mid-range Windows games ran smoothly on the MacBook Neo
Before testing Windows games on this setup, ETA Prime tweaked a setting. The YouTuber has allocated 5 GB of RAM for the virtualization, which is not a lot, but the MacBook Neo is limited to 8 GB of memory for the SoC that it uses.
In the video, ETA Prime focused on the games that don’t have a native macOS version, which is basically why such a virtualization setup would make sense. Among the games tested are Marvel Cosmic…
