Seeking advice re: Parallels on MacBook Air vs MacBook Pro

My wife is planning to buy either a MacBook Air or MacBook Pro. She will need Parallels and Windows 10 to access a VPN where she uses Office applications. We also have a license for Office 2013, which we will install for personal use. She won't be doing any gaming or video editing. She will probably want to use apps such as Safari, Mail and iTunes at the same time as Windows 10.

I'm wondering if anyone has recommendations on RAM and processors. I know that Parallels recommends 8GB of RAM, but are they recommending this just to run Windows, or does 8GB provide good performance when running Windows and Mac OS simultaneously? Also, how does Parallels run on a MacBook Air with a dual-core processor (i5 or i7)? Is it advisable to have a quad-core processor for smooth performance?

Any advice would be greatly appreciated.

 

Hi @Dolph , please follow the steps suggested in the article to know the system requirement of Parallels Desktop for mac and then please check this article to know the difference between Parallels Desktop for mac standard and Pro edition.

 

i usually keep non essential windows VMs (ones used for word, outlook, excel, browsing, e-mail, light apps, etc) constrained to 1 processor and 2gb ram. this seems to be enough. server VMs and my windows development VMs i give 2 cpus and 4gb ram. i can run 2-3 server VMs simultaneously (granted nothing is high cpu except sql occasionally and visual studio) and my usual mac-side workload without noticing much slowdown / issues with either side.

all this on my macbook pro with 16gb ram

on my 12-inch macbook i can run any 1 of those VMs + normal mac workload without issue. if i spin up a 2nd VM things slow down pretty quickly, but never grind to a halt. the macbook is going to slow quicker because of throttling for thermal issues which the macbook air should not encounter.

all of this is a long way of saying, you should be fine (unless you're using very CPU intensive applications) running any available windows OS + macOS on any currently available standard configuration Apple hardware (not BTO) - MacBook, MacBook Air, MacBook Pro...

 

Thanks for sharing.