I’m really curious how well the Macbook Neo works with VCVRack.
Anyone give it a go?
The M-series chips are no doubt fast enough, but I’ve no idea if the video is up to the challenge.
The Neo doesn’t sport an M-class processor, but an iPhone/iPad level A18 Pro chip FYI
The two chipsets run the same instruction set.
It is an ARM chip, so it might run VCV. Someone just needs to try one and report on the experience.
It will run Rack just as well as the original M1 Macbook Air, which is a fantastic machine that many in here are very happy with for Rack. The “M” versus “A” is just marketing. The M chips were developed from the A chips and is the same aarch64 architecture (aka. ARM64), built in roughly the same way. They run the same operating system and software built in the same way.
Now mind you everything should be seen in relation to price. The Neo IMHO is incredible value for money, but the M1 Air which it compares with is a 6 year old machine now and only has 8GB of RAM. You can run Rack comfortably but you wont run extreme patches on it. Do I think it’s probably the best Rack computer for the money? Yes. Do I think it’s a Rack monster? No. But you wouldn’t expect that would you?
You’ll find a comparison here: I put the MacBook Neo through the same tests as I did the MacBook Air M1 — I think the results will surprise you | TechRadar
Worth keeping in mind that at this point in time the Host modules are basically useless on Mac – Plugin GUI lag
Not sure I can completely agree with that. I’ve noticed on my Mac Mini that all plugins have some degree of GUI lag, which is variable between different developers, but it’s usually fine once parameters are set to what you want. I only have one VST instrument that’s completely unusable, which is Unfiltered Audio Battalion. Effects plugins seem to be fine, I’ve got some patches using 32 copies of Valhalla Space Modulator and Freq Echo with polyphonic modulation (don’t ask why!) and yep it’s laggy, but not useless. 
I don’t have any problems running plugins on Windows, so it does seem to be a Mac OS issue.
Does anyone know if this has been reported to VCV support?
Regarding the Neo, I think it should run VCV but I’d be interested to know how well. I’m skint at the moment, but I might try and stretch to an M5 MacBook later in the year though a scheme with my employer, where you can buy tech and pay it off over a year. I haven’t really researched which M model is the best bang for your bucks yet, it’s difficult to find benchmarks that have any relevance to VCV.
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Admittedly I pushed it a bit far with the ‘useless’ comment - but I think it is worth commenting on and being aware of- particularly if you have a large library of plugins. The only ones that I haven’t had issues with are from u-he.
I guess if you have simple plugins with only a few parameters that are easy to map and then you close the GUI for good it’s OK – but that’s a shame since a) how you interact with a piece of software is often the deciding factor in purchasing it and b) it doesn’t happen with other operating systems.
and yup - I have reported it to support, and they were already aware of it – has been mentioned a few times on the forum here and there aswell.
Great, thanks. Let’s hope it’s fixed soon, I love to use plugins with Rack. The way the GUI window stays on top of everything else is also slightly annoying, but there are worse problems!
Are we talking about Intel architecture plugins running through host module on an Apple Silicon machine? To be honest I don’t even know whether the host module is able to do that, but if it does it transparently via the plugin running in Rosetta2, then yeah, the rosetta emulation might hit those GUI’s, don’t know. At any rate you should obviously prefer ARM64 plugins when possible so it’s the same architecture.
I would expect it to run as well as my original M1 Air test, or actually better, since the orgiginal test was Rack under Rosetta2: Apple Silicon M1 - system-on-a-chip to Rule Them All. - #117 by LarsBjerregaard
No - These are native ARM64 Plugins running on the ARM64 Rack build.
I’m also very interested how it and other DAWs run on the neo. I have a 2019 macbook air (one of the last generations to have intel) that I’d be extatic to trade up for. It runs VCV quite badly, other DAWs such as FL and Logic Pro seem OK, but I don’t even try to entertain VCV host on it.
On Windows hardware, Rack requires discrete graphic hardware. I notice that a lot of otherwise well-spec’ed laptops use Intel ARC graphics. I wonder if the Intel GPU hardware is up to the minimum VCVRack standard.
Rack seems to put an unusual load on computers. It taxes a computer’s graphics capability, something I’ve never worried about before with music software. Maybe it could be made more efficient but I’m not sure how. I’m out of the GUI programming game.
See also: The big Rack performance topic