macOS VMs hit 98% host CPU speed, run usable on 2 cores and 4GB RAM

Benchmarking macOS 26.4.1 in a VM on an M4 Pro Mac mini host shows virtualization overhead is minimal for most workloads. Single-core CPU performance hits 98% of host speed, GPU Metal performance reaches 95%, and multi-core scaling holds up well against the host’s P-core count. The clear weak spot is the virtual neural engine, which lags badly on half-precision and quantized CoreML tests — suggesting AI workloads inside VMs would be better routed through CPU or GPU paths.

On the minimum-spec question, a macOS guest stays responsive for browsing and lightweight tasks down to 2 virtual cores and 4 GB RAM, using only about 3.1 GB of that allocation. The practical constraint is disk: VMs need roughly 50–60 GB to handle macOS updates safely, though APFS sparse files mean a 100 GB VM consumes around 54 GB on disk. That makes the rumored MacBook Neo with a 512 GB SSD a viable macOS virtualization host, contrary to earlier skepticism.