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Amphion Argon7LX at AXPONA 2026 Proves Finland Still Builds Speakers That Shame the Rest of Us (Quietly, of Course)

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Finland usually exports two things with authority: hockey players like Teemu Selänne and beverages that feel like a dare. High-end loudspeakers? Not so much — at least that was the assumption before Amphion Loudspeakers decided to quietly ruin that narrative.

First unveiled at High End Munich 2025, the new Argon X-Series which includes the Argon3X, Argon3LX, and Argon7LX, finally made its way to AXPONA 2026, giving us our first real chance to hear what all the quiet confidence was about.

No, Amphion doesn’t offer the same overwhelming breadth of models as the Danes who practically carpet-bombed this show with options, but that’s not really the point. What Amphion brings is focus: cleaner execution, refined engineering, and a sound that leans toward honesty over theatrics. With expanded U.S. distribution through Playback Distribution, these Finnish imports are no longer a niche curiosity.

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Finnish Precision Meets Studio Credibility

For more than 25 years, Amphion Loudspeakers has taken a more restrained approach to speaker design. Instead of boosting bass or adding extra sparkle up top to grab attention in a quick demo, their speakers are built to play it straight. What you hear is closer to what was actually recorded, which means better recordings sound great and bad ones have nowhere to hide.

That same approach has carried into the pro audio world over the past decade, where engineers working with Billie Eilish, Beck, and Kendrick Lamar rely on Amphion studio monitors for mixing. Film composers such as Ali Shaheed Muhammad and Jussi Tegelman have adopted them as well, where consistency and accuracy matter more than sounding impressive for five minutes.

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Amphion Argon7LX: What It Is and What Actually Changed

The Argon7LX is a floorstanding loudspeaker from Amphion Loudspeakers that sticks to a fairly straightforward concept on paper but executes it with a level of precision that’s anything but casual. It’s a two-way design using a passive radiator system, built around a newly developed 1 inch titanium tweeter and dual 6.5-inch aluminum woofers. That configuration is meant to deliver full range sound without relying on a traditional port, which helps keep the bass tighter and more controlled, especially in real rooms where things can get messy fast.

The biggest update here is the tweeter, and it’s not a cosmetic change. Amphion revised it to improve low level detail and clean up the top end without pushing things into fatigue. There’s more information, but it’s presented in a controlled way. The crossover has also been reworked and sits at 1600 Hz, which is relatively low, helping create a smoother transition between the tweeter and woofers. The result is better integration, so the sound doesn’t feel segmented across frequencies.

That carries into the soundstage. Imaging is stable, placement is precise, and nothing shifts around when the material gets more complex. The bass remains controlled, but the more noticeable change is how it connects with the midrange and treble. The overall presentation is more cohesive and consistent.

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For the demo, Amphion Loudspeakers used two compact TEAC AP-507 power amplifiers, also distributed in the U.S. by Playback Distribution. Each amplifier delivers 170 watts per channel into 4 ohms and can be configured for stereo, bi-amp, or bridged operation, with higher output available in BTL mode. The pairing had no issue driving the Argon7LX to normal listening levels with control and stability, which is notable given the size of the amplifiers.

On the practical side, the Argon7LX is a 4 ohm speaker with a sensitivity rating of 91 dB, which means it’s not especially hard to drive but will benefit from an amplifier with solid current delivery. Amphion recommends anywhere from 50 to 300 watts, which gives you some flexibility depending on your setup.

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Frequency response is rated from 28 Hz to 55 kHz at minus 6 dB, so it reaches low enough for most music without needing a subwoofer, while also extending well beyond the limits of human hearing on the top end.

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Physically, it’s a substantial speaker without being ridiculous. Just over 45 inches tall, under 10 inches wide, and weighing about 60 pounds each, it’s designed to fit into real living spaces without dominating them.

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So how did it sound? Calm, controlled… and slightly judging you

I walked into the room expecting at least a small crowd and… nothing. A few seats open, plenty of space, almost suspiciously calm. This system had no business being that overlooked. My host didn’t rush anything, just handed me the reins. When I asked for electronic music, he cracked a slight smile and queued up a few tracks he clearly had ready. Finns get it. They’ll dismantle your penalty kill and still have time to argue about synth textures.

Right off the bat, the neutrality hits. No extra flavor, no “look what I can do” tuning. Just fast, clean, open sound that moves with real intent. Propulsive fits. The music had momentum, not just presence. It filled the room without feeling pushed, and there was an ease to it that made you stop thinking about the system and just let it run. Detail was there, but it didn’t feel dissected. More like everything was just… available.

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The bass? Not trying to win any Texas BBQ competitions. This isn’t brisket dripping onto your plate. More like a perfectly trimmed filet—tight, controlled, and cooked exactly how it should be. You might want a little more heft if that’s your thing, but it never felt thin or out of place. There was even a hint of that club-like scale, just without the kind of low end that rearranges your organs and your plans for the next morning. Don’t forget to bring some protection.

For more information: amphion.fi

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Tesla is working on a smaller, cheaper electric SUV

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Three of the sources said the new model would be produced in China, while one added that Tesla also aims to expand production to the United States and Europe. Two sources said the vehicle would measure about 4.28 meters (14.0 feet) in length, making it significantly shorter than the Model…
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Eight years later, Apple quietly shuts the door on AI chief John Giannandrea

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Since his retirement was announced in 2025, Apple Intelligence head John Giannandrea has been reduced to the role of an advisor, but is now expected to exit Apple Park shortly.

Middleaged man with short gray hair, glasses, and goatee speaking onstage, wearing a dark jacket and headset microphone, with blurred conference text SF 2017 in the background
John Giannandrea – image credit: Apple

If you spend your notice period at home, you’re on gardening leave. If you spend it at work and you’re waiting for when your contracted stock bonuses realize, it’s called “rest and vest”.
It appears that the stock options agreed for John Giannandrea’s contract when Apple hired him in 2018, are due on April 15. According to Bloomberg’s “Power On” newsletter, Giannandrea is consequently going to leave around then.
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Who Had “New OS For The Z80” On Their 2026 Bingo Card?

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Some might say the venerable Z80 doesn’t need another operating system, but [Scott Baker] obviously disagrees. He has come up with a brand new, from scratch OS called NostOS for the Z80-based RC2014 homebrew retrocomputer. [Scott] describes it as CP/M-like, but it’s not CP/M– in fact, it’s totally incompatible with CP/M–and has a few tricks of its own up its sleeve.

As you might expect of an operating system for this vintage of hardware, it is “rommable” — that is, designed to run from read-only-memory, and fit inside 64kB. It of course supports banking memory to go higher than that 16 bit limit, and natively supports common serial devices, along with the good old WD37C65 floppy controller to get some spinning rust into the game. Of course if you don’t have floppies you can plug in a compact flash card– try that with CP/M– or, interestingly Intel Bubble Memory. [Scott] has a soft-spot for bubble memory, which at one point seemed poised to replace both hard drives and RAM at the same time. We also appreciate that he included drivers for vacuum fluorescent displays, another forgotten but very cool technology. Back in the day, this operating system would have enabled a very cool little computer, especially when you take his implementation of text-to-speech with the SP0256A-AL2 chip. Fancy a game of talking Zork? Yes, he ported Zork, and yes, it talks.

The whole thing is, of course, open-source, and available on [Scott]’s GitHub. Unlike too many open-source projects, the documentation is top-notch, to the point that we could picture getting it in a three-ring binder with a 5 1/4 floppy on the inside cover. If you like video, we’ve embedded [Scott]’s walkthrough but his blog and the docs on GitHub have everything there and more if you’re not into rapidly-flickering-pixels as an information exchange medium.

[Scott] isn’t wedded to Zilog, for the record; this OS should run on an Intel 8080, perhaps like the one in the Prompt 80 he restored last year. 

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Thanks to [Scott Baker] for the tip!

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Trump officials may be encouraging banks to test Anthropic’s Mythos model

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Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent and Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell summoned bank executives for a meeting this week where they encouraged the executives to use Anthropic’s new Mythos model to detect vulnerabilities, according to Bloomberg

Indeed, while JPMorgan Chase was the only bank listed as one of the initial partner organizations with access to the model, Goldman Sachs, Citigroup, Bank of America, and Morgan Stanley are reportedly testing Mythos as well.

Anthropic announced the model this week but said it would be limiting access for now, in part because Mythos — despite not being trained specifically for cybersecurity — is too good at finding security vulnerabilities. (Others suggested this was hype or simply a smart enterprise sales strategy.)

The report is particularly surprising since Anthropic is currently battling the Trump administration in court over the Department of Defense’s designation of Anthropic as a supply-chain risk; that designation came after negotiations fell apart over the company’s efforts to limit how its AI models can be used by the government.

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Meanwhile, the Financial Times reports that U.K. financial regulators are also discussing the risk posed by Mythos.

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OpenAI’s new $100 ChatGPT Pro plan targets Claude Max with five times the Codex access

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In short: OpenAI launched a new $100 per month Pro plan for ChatGPT on 9 April 2026, inserting a new tier between the existing $20 Plus plan and the $200 Pro plan and directly targeting Anthropic’s Claude Max, which is also priced at $100 per month. The new plan offers five times more Codex usage than Plus, access to the same model suite as the $200 tier, and a launch promotion that temporarily doubles that advantage: through 31 May 2026, subscribers get ten times the Codex usage of Plus. The move follows Codex crossing three million weekly users on 8 April, a growth rate the company describes as a 5x increase in three months.

What the $100 plan includes, and where it sits in ChatGPT’s pricing structure

The new plan is the sixth pricing tier in ChatGPT’s current structure, which now runs from a free account with advertising, through a $8 per month Go plan, the $20 per month Plus plan, to two versions of Pro at $100 and $200 per month, a $25 per user per month Business plan, and custom-priced Enterprise contracts. The $100 Pro plan sits directly between Plus and the existing $200 Pro tier, offering five times the Codex usage of Plus and targeting what OpenAI describes as “longer, high-effort Codex sessions” that Plus subscribers hit the ceiling on. The $200 Pro plan, by comparison, provides 20 times the Codex usage of Plus, making it four times more Codex-intensive than the new $100 tier.

Despite the difference in usage limits, both Pro tiers give access to the same model suite: the exclusive GPT-5.4 Pro model, unlimited use of GPT-5.4 Instant and GPT-5.4 Thinking, and all other features available on the $200 plan. The differentiation between the two tiers is usage volume, not capability. As a launch promotion, subscribers to the new $100 plan will receive ten times the Codex usage of Plus through 31 May 2026; after that date, the standard five times limit applies. OpenAI also announced a rebalancing of the Plus plan’s Codex allocation alongside the new tier, shifting Plus towards steadier day-to-day usage rather than allowing the longer burst sessions that the $100 plan is intended to serve.

Codex demand: the numbers that prompted the new tier

On 8 April 2026, the day before the $100 plan was announced, Sam Altman posted on X that OpenAI was resetting Codex’s usage limits across all plans “to celebrate 3M weekly codex users,” and committed to repeating the reset for every additional million users until Codex reaches ten million weekly users. Thibault Sottiaux, who leads the Codex product, stated: “Three million people are now using Codex weekly, up from two million a little under a month ago.” OpenAI described the growth trajectory as a 5x increase in the preceding three months, with 70% month-over-month user growth.

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The scale of that growth reflects a shift in how developers are using AI coding tools. OpenAI rolled out a dedicated Codex app for macOS in February 2026, designed to move beyond line-by-line code generation into what the company called agentic, multi-task coding workflows: orchestrating multiple agents in parallel, running background jobs, and handling instructions that span hours rather than seconds. That architecture, with its longer-running sessions and heavier compute demands, is precisely the usage pattern that the $100 plan is priced to capture. A Plus subscriber who uses Codex for extended autonomous engineering tasks hits usage limits well before their billing cycle ends; the $100 plan is designed to be the next logical tier rather than a jump to $200.

The Claude Max comparison

OpenAI made no attempt to obscure the competitive framing. The new plan is priced identically to Anthropic’s Claude Max 5x tier, which also costs $100 per month and includes elevated limits for Claude Code, Anthropic’s terminal-based agentic coding product. Claude Code has become the fastest-growing part of Anthropic’s commercial portfolio, with an estimated $2.5 billion in annualised revenue by early 2026, and Anthropic has been constructing a developer ecosystem around it: Anthropic launched a marketplace for Claude-powered enterprise software in March 2026, with launch partners including Snowflake, Harvey, and Replit, connecting enterprise buyers with third-party applications built on Claude.

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The competitive dynamic sharpened further in the week before OpenAI’s announcement. On 4 April 2026, Anthropic banned third-party agents from Claude Pro and Max subscriptions, preventing subscribers from routing their plan’s usage limits through external frameworks such as OpenClaw; users wanting to continue using those tools must now pay separately under a new per-session “extra usage” system. OpenAI’s announcement went in the opposite direction, increasing Codex availability at the $100 price point and doubling it temporarily to mark the launch. The contrast, at the identical price, was visible enough that most coverage described the new plan as a direct response to Anthropic’s developer subscriber base.

What OpenAI’s pricing move signals

The new tier arrives during a period of accelerating commercial momentum for OpenAI. OpenAI’s $122 billion raise at an $852 billion valuation, completed in March 2026, was led by SoftBank, NVIDIA, and Amazon, and included $3 billion from individual retail investors, a structure that many analysts read as groundwork for an IPO expected as early as the fourth quarter of 2026. The company is generating $2 billion in revenue per month and has more than 50 million paid subscribers across its plans. The $100 plan is part of a deliberate effort to fill the pricing gap between $20 and $200 that had, until now, left a large segment of heavy but not enterprise-grade users without a compelling upgrade path.

The model powering the Pro tiers, GPT-5.4, which launched in March 2026 and introduced native computer use directly into Codex and the API, is the clearest statement of where OpenAI sees the next phase of developer adoption going: not prompting, but autonomous agents operating software, navigating file systems, and running multi-step workflows across applications for hours at a time. The $100 plan is the pricing expression of that bet. Whether it moves enough developers at the $100 Claude Max price point to make a measurable difference in Anthropic’s subscriber base will be visible in both companies’ next quarterly metrics.

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‘Marshals’ Release Schedule: When Episode 7 Hits Paramount Plus

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Marshals, a new Yellowstone spinoff starring Luke Grimes as Kayce Dutton, is airing on CBS right now. You can also tune in with Paramount Plus. The Yellowstone sequel series sees Grimes’ former Navy SEAL join an elite unit of US Marshals to bring range justice to Montana, according to a synopsis from CBS.

The show includes Yellowstone actors Gil Birmingham as Thomas Rainwater, Mo Brings Plenty as Mo and Brecken Merrill as Tate. Spencer Hudnut is the showrunner of Marshals — formerly known as Y: Marshals — and Taylor Sheridan is an executive producer.

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When to watch new Marshals episodes on Paramount Plus

Episode 7 of Marshals airs on CBS on Sunday, April 12. Viewing options for Paramount Plus customers vary by subscription tier. You can watch the episode live if you have Paramount Plus Premium, which includes your local CBS station. If you subscribe to Paramount Plus Essential, you can watch the installment on demand the following Monday, but not live on Sunday.

Here’s a release schedule for the next two episodes of Marshals.

  • Episode 7, Family Business: Premieres on CBS/Paramount Plus Premium on April 12 at 8 p.m. ET/8 p.m. PT/7 p.m. CT. Streams on Paramount Plus Essential on April 13.
  • Episode 8, Blowback: Premieres on CBS/Paramount Plus Premium on April 19 at 8 p.m. ET/8 p.m. PT/7 p.m. CT. Streams on Paramount Plus Essential on April 20.

You can also watch CBS and the seventh episode of Marshals without cable with a live TV streaming service such as YouTube TV, Hulu Plus Live TV or the DirecTV MyNews skinny bundle. In addition to offering a lower-cost option, Paramount Plus lets you watch the other two Yellowstone spinoffs: the prequels 1883 and 1923.

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James Martin/CNET

After a price increase in early 2026, the ad-supported Essential version runs $9 per month or $90 per year. The ad-free Premium version runs $14 per month or $140 per year. Paying more for Premium gives you downloads, the ability to watch more Showtime programming than Essential and access to your live, local CBS station.

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Sunday Reboot: MacBook Neo upgrades, masses of Mac minis, and iPhone re-entry

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In this week’s “Sunday Reboot,” a storage upgrade for the MacBook Neo, an excuse to buy many Mac minis, and the iPhones come back to Earth with a late congratulatory message.

Silhouetted person in shadow peers through a narrow opening toward a brightly lit wall of stacked silver computer mini desktops with ports and indicator lights
Image credits: NASA/Overcast

Sunday Reboot is a weekly column covering some of the lighter stories within the Apple reality distortion field from the past seven days. All to get the next week underway with a good first step.
This week, researchers managed to get around Apple Intelligence security measures using prompt injection techniques, a repairability report panned Apple’s hardware again, and Apple’s lawsuit with Epic Games over the App Store continued to roll on. There was also a bug found to break Mac networking every 49 days, 17 hours, two minutes, and 47 seconds.
Continue Reading on AppleInsider | Discuss on our Forums

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Tesla Achieves European Breakthrough as Full Self-Driving Supervised Reaches Dutch Roads

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Tesla FSD Europe Netherlands Launch Test Drive
Tesla finally received approval on April 10 from the Dutch vehicle regulator, the RDW, for its Full Self-Driving Supervised system to be used on European roads. They were the first to receive approval for this advanced technology across Europe, marking a significant milestone for the company. This means that the program has been cleared to run on public roads in the Netherlands, and the distribution began the next day, April 11, for a limited number of early testers who had been patiently waiting.



Drivers with Hardware 4 (HW4) computers in their vehicles received an upgrade to version 2026.3.6, which included the European-tuned build of FSD 14.2.2.5. Before turning on the system, drivers must complete a fast tutorial followed by a mini test within the car interface. Once that’s done, they can take their hands off the wheel under appropriate situations, and cameras will watch their eyes to see if they’re paying attention. If they become distracted, the system will begin to display visual alarms, followed by sounds and vibrations if they do not return to it, and if all else fails, the car will slow down and come to a safe stop on its own.


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Overall, this was the product of 18 months of testing, which included more than 1.5 million kilometers of driving on European highways, as well as numerous controlled scenarios on closed tracks. Before approving the system, regulators reviewed almost 400 compliance points. The RDW pronounced it a beneficial addition to road safety, but stressed that drivers must remain in the driver’s seat and ready to take over at any time.


The European version of the software is substantially different from the one accessible in the United States. This is primarily due to the way regulators work here, which requires them to do pre-market checks, as opposed to their US counterparts’ self-certification strategy. As a result, the Dutch construction is more cautious and limits some of the more aggressive driving characteristics available elsewhere. Automatic turns at junctions and navigation-based lane changes are still accessible, but several parking-lot summoning capabilities found in the United States are not available in the Netherlands.

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Subscribers will pay 99 euros per month to receive the system, or 49 euros per month if they already have Enhanced Autopilot. Alternatively, they can purchase it outright for 7,500 euros. Tesla claims that the system leverages billions of kilometers of real-world data collected worldwide, and Elon Musk has just stated that the RDW review process was particularly rigorous.

Tesla FSD Europe Netherlands Launch Test Drive
The Dutch approval is now a one-time occurrence, although it has a provisional validity period of at least 36 months. It means that other European states can adopt it on their own, and authorities in Germany, France, and Italy are expected to do so within the next 4 to 8 weeks. Tesla’s goal is to have the system more widely accepted across the EU by the summer, allowing millions of drivers to use it without having to repeat the testing procedure in each nation.
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Apple reportedly testing out four different styles for its smart glasses that will rival Meta Ray-Bans

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Apple may be late to the smart glasses market, but it could be covering all its bases with up to four potential styles for its upcoming product. According to Bloomberg‘s Mark Gurman, Apple could launch some or all of the four styles it’s currently testing for its smart glasses.

Gurman reported Apple is testing out a large rectangular frame that’s comparable to Ray-Ban Wayfarers, a slimmer rectangular design like the glasses that Apple CEO Tim Cook wears, a larger oval or circular frame and a smaller oval or circle option. Apple is also working on a range of colors, including black, ocean blue and light brown, according to Bloomberg.

Internally code-named N50 for now, Apple’s upcoming smart glasses will compete directly with the second-gen Ray-Ban Meta model. While similar, Apple might be differentiating its design with “vertically oriented oval lenses with surrounding lights,” according to the report. Like Meta’s smart glasses, Apple’s upcoming product will capture photos and videos, but is meant to better sync with an iPhone, allowing users to take advantage of Apple’s ecosystem for editing, sharing, phone calls, notifications, music and even its voice assistant, according to Gurman. The release of Apple’s smart glasses could even coincide with the upcoming improved Siri that should arrive with iOS 27.

Gurman reported that Apple could reveal its smart glasses as soon as the end of 2026 or early 2027, followed by an official release sometime in 2027. As for the competition, Meta released its latest model that’s better suited for prescription lenses and offers a more customizable fit.

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The MacBook Neo is moonlighting as a Windows gaming machine, and it’s doing it well

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Apple didn’t position its most affordable MacBook as a gaming machine. The MacBook Neo, a budget-leaning laptop that runs on Apple’s A18 Pro chip, the same chip that powers the iPhone 16 Pro models, has been put through a Windows 11 gaming test for YouTuber ETA Prime. 

Turns out, the results are genuinely surprising. Using Parallels Desktop, a virtualization app (paid) with 3D hardware acceleration, the channel ran Windows 11 ARM directly on the Neo’s 8GB RAM (allocating 5GB to the virtual environment), and it did better than most people would think it would. 

What games actually ran well?

Dirt 3 held 75 fps at 1200p on high settings, while Portal 2 cleared 100 fps on medium settings. Skyrim, on the other hand, maintained roughly 60 fps at 1200p resolution on medium graphics settings, while Marvel Cosmic Invasion averaged around 60 fps at the maximum resolution.

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What helped performance was games running as native Windows-on-ARM applications. However, GTA V was among the notable stumbles, as the frame rates through the Parelles weren’t playable at all. However, according to Notebookcheck, the game runs acceptably via Crossover. 

Why does this matter for everyday MacBook Neo users?

For users who work on their Mac but occasionally enjoy playing Windows-only games, MacBook Neo’s ability to run native titles via the Parallels app comes as good news. The cost? Parallels Desktop’s Standard tier costs $99.99 per year, which could add to your weekend leisure sessions. 

Anyways, the bigger takeaway is that the MacBook Neo, even with 8GB of RAM (highlighted as a constraint in the video), can run low-to-mid-range Windows games. It also changes the notion around budget Apple hardware being primarily for productivity-based tasks. 

As virtualization tech continues to improve and Apple provides more RAM in future generations of the MacBook Neo, it could redefine what “budget” actually means for Apple buyers, bridging the gap between MacBook and Windows laptops even further. 

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