“MacBook Pro M4 vs. MacBook Air M3 for Virtual Machine and Productivity”

What do you find you are most productive doing with each operating system?

If you are really in need for Office and assignments that are to be done on Windows then spend your money on something that is purely Windows. Why to spend that money while you are going to have VM!
If you are still considering the mac for the virtualisation, then get the Macbook Pro as it has a fan and it would not suffer from thermal throttling.

Wow, that's hard to say. My gut tells me go with the newer processor. While 24 gb of ram sounds nice, 16 should be just fine, as you can dedicate 8 to the vm. I'm using an m1 macbook air with only 8 gb ram, but the ram in these newer macbooks already performs better than in the old ones, since it's all on the same chip. Running Windows on this MB air is not a fantastic experience, but with an extra 4 gb of ram I bet it would be absolutely amazing. Right now, for some basic tasks that I can't do on the mac side, it gets me by.

Also the M4 Air is coming to market soon.

Although the Air is perfect for office tasks and is more portable compared to the Pro model, I’d definitely recommend getting the M4 model. It has fans for cooling, which would help with the VM and m4 offers significant gains when it comes to the performance. I’d also recommend getting the M4 Pro model with 24 GB of RAM and a 512 GB SSD, especially since it's Black Friday and it's priced at $1,749 on Amazon, with a $250 discount.

As people say in comment threads on Facebook, "Following."

I am most productive on Windows but would really love to make macOS work with a VM. What have peoples' experiences been doing this?

I'm following as well.

Hi,
I've had amazing luck for my needs running a VM. Parallels can be tricky to set up due to the lack of accessibility of controls, but once you get it configured the way you would like it, it's insanely easy to boot and get going. I've set it up once since I got it running on my M1 air specked out to 16 GB of RAM and 1tb, and have never had to touch settings again. I personally notice minimal performance and energy impacts whilest the vm is running, and I've found this setup works perfect for office, web browsing, and even Teams/Zoom meetings.
As for keyboard remapping, I use sharpkeys on the VM side to remap my right command key to Insert, and you can also connect USB devices directly to the vm itself. I've even connected something like a Logitech Mx Keys to the VM direct, telling the USB dongle side to go straight to Windows, and a Bluetooth device to go to Mac. This lets me still have a MacOS window active, whilest being able to control the VM in the background without minimal fuss. Bear in mind however the copy of Windows that any VM you run from VMWare or Parallels is Windows 11 ARM, so standard compatibility hurdles apply.
I second the suggestion that if you are going to be using Windows extensively for business, educational, or professional use grab yourself a Windows machine, however if you are a casual home user a VM would work just fine.

For the original poster however, depending on your budget and needs within education you may be able to get by with an air, however I'd allow at least 512gb of storage and 16 gb of RAM. Amazon currently is offering a good discount on both 16 and 24 gb ram models through Black Friday, however with the education discount you can still get pretty good deals and even customize storage for your needs.

Reach out if you have any questions; happy to share my experiences where I can.

I am very interested in this topic as well. I was about to ask my own question about this. I use a Windows machine with Jaws for work, so I'm comfortable with how things are done over there. However when I was doing my Master's degree back in 2015-2017 I used a Mac Mini, and loved it. I had enough usable vision at that time to use Zoom in conjunction with Voiceover, and It was great. I've lost all of my vision since then though, and I do remember many times when issues I had with voiceover were solved by reverting to using the mouse.
I'm looking to purchase a new computer for home use, and I am so torn about which operating system to go with. I love the Mac hardware and the integration with my iPhone. I would rather not have to pay for a yearly subscription for Microsoft 365 just to use Outlook, but I haven't been able to get any other mail client on Windows to work nearly as well as the native Mac mail app. On the other hand, a lot of what I'll be doing is web browsing and text editing, which seems to work a lot better on Windows, at least for me. I was really hoping that a virtual machine might be the answer to my dilemma. I would love to hear all of the pros and cons, advantages and disadvantages, joys and frustrations of using Windows in a virtual machine vs. on a dedicated Windows laptop. Also it sounds like everyone thinks 16gb of memory is enough to run it smoothly. Is that the general consensis?

Just FYI, outlook has replaced Windows Mail in the latest builds of Windows 11, probably Windows 10 as well. So, no need for a yearly subscription to Microsoft 365, if you just wanted access to Outlook mail.

HTH.

How did you get Parallels to work as a VoiceOver user? Could you share your experience with it? I know it’s not inexpensive, but if I can get it to work with macOS and VoiceOver, I’ll consider using it instead of VMware Workstation.

hey Hugo, to answer your questions, jaws and NVDA are compatible with, windows. As for what apps will be compatible, it all depends on what apps you use, and whether they have support for Windows on arm, which is what you will have to use.

Most apps now have support for windows. For those that don’t you can use emulation, don’t know how that works, but apparently it’s slower to use.

and yes, I pointed out that you will have to use windows on arm. Microsoft has now officially started putting windows on arm.ISO files on their download page, so now you don’t have to use the insider ISO.

hope this helps you.

And also, to answer the main topic of discussion, it depends. I forgot, but what machine do you have currently? If you have a MacBook Air and like the portability, I would go for it. The 13.6 inch m3 air would be good enough for your use case. it’s powerful, and will work for nearly all tasks. I’m using an M1 MacBook Air, 16 GB ram/512 GB SSD, and everything is still really really speedy.

Hi,
I prefer Parallels over VmWARE as the setup nonrelated to accessibility is more simplistic. You will need VOOCR to read and interact with items. Downloads, setup, and keyboard commands can be found here.
https://github.com/chigkim/VOCR

After downloading and running Parallels, you'll want to use VOOCR to get you through the setup. Hitting get windows 11 followed by continue should do the trick. On the next screen you can actually change the edition I believe (I have windows 11 pro). The download and setup of the OS is all automated. Follow the prompts using VOOCR's navigation and reading commands, insuring to do a recognition every time you activate an item. Once you get Windows 11 up you'll be in the settings window of Windows 11; the biggest hurdle is to accept the terms and conditions. In the end I ended up having sighted assistance for this part as the VM overlays the area where you're supposed to hit accept. After this is accepted, you should be able to get into the VM, and hit cmd+ctrl+enter to fire up narrator.
The next thing that you will want to do is configure settings and the VM, although this article is likely meant more for gaming, you can utilize, some, most, or all of the tricks discussed here.
https://forum.audiogames.net/topic/53463/parallels-configuration-guide/
As for reconfiguring keys, I downloaded SharpKeys onto VM and remapped insert to right CMD. This process is accessible without much fussing around. I did have to go into Parallels settings (note this is different than the configure VM), and disable all of the checkboxes for keyboard shortcuts. If this step is not done, you may experience extreme difficulties interacting with Windows as a screen-reader user and getting the behavior you desire to perform.

The nice thing is you do have a 14 day trial to experiment, and if memory serves me correctly I had no issues with activation provided having to use VOOCR once again to bridge the inaccessibility gap of the Parallels UI. Once setup is all set up and done, the user experience is seemless. I'm able to fire up the VM from the desktop, and it loads i believe quicker than loading windows onto actual hardware. Have a look around both VM and Parallels settings as well, there is lots of customization, and majority of settings can also be manipulated via the menu bar menus whilest in the VM window.

If anyone needs additional assistance or has follow-up questions/concerns, feel free to reach out. I hope this benefits.

I unfortunately don't have any experience using VMWare at least not in a few years, so I can't directly compare the differences between the two programs.

Regarding the JAWS keyboard shortcuts, as I mentioned earlier I have found that it is better to map something like the JAWS key to another key on the keyboard. I decided to use my right command key with insert specifically so I could still have access to the Capslock key if needed. In otherwords, whenever you have the VM as the active Window, and you were to press right command, that key by itself or in conjunction with other keys would be interpreted as the insert key. You would also need to tell JAWS to use insert as the JAWS key, however I believe this is set by default.

Hope this helps

ok. i'm running a vm of windows 11 arm on my macbook air m3 with 16 gb ram, and 512 storage. even running the vm and running a stack of tabs in a browser in it, and other software, doesn't even begin to heat up my computer at all. it stays cold nearly always unless i'm zipping something up or something. seriously, the vm runs like a dream, and runs so much faster than any windows computer i've used. i have put in a line into the vm file that let's me connect a usb keyboard / usb dongle for a wireless keyboard directly to the vm so that i can use the keyboard just as windows would normally.

That's awesome to hear. Which program are you using to run the VM? And which Windows screen reader are you using? Just curious because I know JAWS is a resource hog, so I didn't know if it could run well with only 8gb of RAM. I'm assuming that's how much you allocated for the VM?

What app are you using for your VM?

Audacity and Reaper are great. Amadeus works really well too.