[HN Gopher] Big data on the cheapest MacBook
___________________________________________________________________
Big data on the cheapest MacBook
Author : bcye
Score : 280 points
Date : 2026-03-12 11:41 UTC (11 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (duckdb.org)
(TXT) w3m dump (duckdb.org)
| TutleCpt wrote:
| Oh great, the term "big data" is back.
| michalc wrote:
| So my definition of big data was data so big it cannot be
| processed on a single machine in a reasonable amount of time.
|
| I guess they're using a different definition?
| bcye wrote:
| I think they are simply referring to analytical workloads.
| rattray wrote:
| > For our first experiment, we used ClickBench, an analytical
| database benchmark. ClickBench has 43 queries that focus on
| aggregation and filtering operations. The operations run on a
| single wide table with 100M rows, which uses about 14 GB when
| serialized to Parquet and 75 GB when stored in CSV format.
|
| very much so...
| jawns wrote:
| I think it's partly tongue in cheek, because when "big data"
| was over hyped, everyone claimed they were working with big
| data, or tried to sell expensive solutions for working with
| big data, and some reasonable minds spoke up and pointed out
| that a standard laptop could process more "big data" than
| people thought.
| rrr_oh_man wrote:
| In my former life as a soulless consultant mid-level IT
| managers really liked to hear the 3 "V"s mentioned: Velocity,
| Volume, Variety
| speedgoose wrote:
| The V of Value is very important in some circles.
| speedgoose wrote:
| Computers got bigger and software got smarter.
|
| You have phones that are faster than cloud VMs of the past.
| You can use bare metal servers with up to 344 cores and 16TB
| of ram.
|
| I used to share your definition too, but I now say that if it
| doesn't open in Microsoft Excel, it's big data.
| Zambyte wrote:
| Processing data that cannot be processed on a single
| machine is fundamentally a different problem than
| processing data that can be processed on a single machine.
| It's useful to have a term for that.
|
| As you say, single machines can scale up incredibly far.
| That just means 16 TB datasets no longer demand big data
| solutions.
| speedgoose wrote:
| I get your point, but I don't know if big data is the
| right term anymore.
|
| Many people like to think they have big data, and you
| kinda have to agree with them if you want their money. At
| least in consulting.
|
| Also you could go well beyond a 16TB dataset on a single
| machine. You assume that the whole uncompressed dataset
| has to fit in memory, but many workloads don't need that.
|
| How many people in the world have such big datasets to
| analyse within reasonable time?
|
| Some people say extreme data.
| brudgers wrote:
| "Your data isn't big" is a good working definition of big
| data.
|
| Google has big data. You are not google.
| antonyh wrote:
| I think the definition of big is smaller than that. Mine
| was "too big to fit on a maxed-out laptop", effectively
| >8TB. Our photo collection is bigger than that, it's not
| 'big data'.
|
| Or one could define it as too big to fit on a single
| SSD/HDD, maybe >30TB. Still within the reach of a hobbyist,
| but too large to process in memory and needs special tools
| to work with. It doesn't have to be petabyte scale to need
| 'big data' tooling.
| hermanzegerman wrote:
| That's an awesome idea to get a bricked MacBook Neo really fast
| because those idiots soldered the SSD inside
| windowsrookie wrote:
| Apple has been soldering the SSD into MacBooks for over 10
| years now, and most 10 year old MacBooks still have a working
| SSD.
| hermanzegerman wrote:
| Not if you're powerusing it like in the Article and relying
| heavily on Swap.
|
| Also there are countless reports of bricked M1 8GB MacBook
| Airs that are bricked because the SSD used up it's write
| cycles
|
| https://youtu.be/0qbrLiGY4Cg?si=mjKn2oLjqAb36hPU
| havaloc wrote:
| That's not what the video insinuates.
| hermanzegerman wrote:
| Yes you're right. I meaned a different video, but I can't
| find it right now. I've looked it up, and back then MacOS
| had a bug which exacerbated that issue. Here is an
| article
|
| https://www.macrumors.com/2021/02/23/m1-mac-users-report-
| exc...
| windowsrookie wrote:
| You originally stated "Also there are countless reports
| of bricked M1 8GB MacBook Airs that are bricked because
| the SSD used up it's write cycles"
|
| Do you have a source for these "countless bricked SSD's"?
| hermanzegerman wrote:
| Here was the Video I meant back then.
|
| https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=MZuv4TIjk-I&pp=ygURZGVhZCBN
| YWN...
| lachlan_gray wrote:
| Not sure about the ssd in particular but the neo is apparently
| pretty modular
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5k7Lv7f-5CQ
| sam345 wrote:
| Fantastic tear down. Thank you. Amazing for Apple. I hope
| this is the trend going forward but probably not. But still a
| gazillion screws? I just replaced the keyboard for my old hp
| elitebook with two screws.
| hermanzegerman wrote:
| I don't care about a gazillion screws, if it's serviceable
| in the End.
|
| If Apple would build their laptops serviceable like
| ThinkPads I would buy one today.
| MBCook wrote:
| It seems like they're starting to learn the cost of being
| _too_ integrated.
|
| They've slowly been moving towards making it easier to
| repair individual broken parts. I'm very happy to see
| that a new keyboard doesn't require replacing the entire
| top case. That was just crazy.
| BoredPositron wrote:
| Queue the endless blog posts about running tech on the potato
| macbook and being stunned it's functional with massive trade-
| offs. Groundbreaking stuff.
| Schiendelman wrote:
| That usage is "Cue", not "queue".
| LeifCarrotson wrote:
| Cue the queue of blogs! Trigger the formation of a line of
| posts to be published sequentially.
| opentokix wrote:
| Mind blown, if you need to handle "big" data on the move - the
| macbook neo is not the right choice. - Who would have guessed
| that outcome?
| g947o wrote:
| It occurs to me that there is near zero overlap between people
| who use a Macbook Neo and people who run DuckDB locally.
|
| It would be a surprise if more than 0.1% of Macbook Neo users
| have even heard of DuckDB.
|
| Which means that this article is probably just riding the hype.
| hrmtst93837 wrote:
| Trying DuckDB on lower-end Macbooks does show you dont need
| much muscle for moderate-size analytics. Long term it isnt
| cost-effective compared to budget laptops but its super
| simple for self-contained pipelines. The thing is 8GB RAM
| leaves you stuck once your data actually grows past the
| marketing demo.
| NetMageSCW wrote:
| Can't give up and admit that 8GB of RAM is enough, can you?
| g947o wrote:
| I think you completely missed the point.
|
| People buy Macbook Neo because they "just need a laptop" or
| are budget conscious.
|
| I imagine a student would get their hands wet with Postgre
| before looking at DuckDB or similar.
|
| It would be a surprise if they do heavy workloads with
| DuckDB. In which case it's definitely worth investing in a
| more powerful computer.
| montroser wrote:
| This is as much an indictment of AWS compute as it is anything
| else.
| api wrote:
| Yeah, this is really about how ludicrously overpriced big cloud
| is. I've got a first gen M1 Max and it destroys all but the
| largest cloud instances (that cost its entire current market
| value per month!), at least in compute. _It's a laptop!_ A
| decent bare metal server in a rack will destroy any laptop.
|
| It's staggering. Jaw dropping. Bandwidth is even worse, like
| 10000X markup.
|
| Yet cloud is how we do things. There's a generation or maybe
| two now of developers who know nothing but cloud SaaS.
|
| I watched everyone fall for it in real time.
| arh5451 wrote:
| I agree and disagree, the benefit with cloud is you "don't
| need to manage it", it scales automatically, redundancy, and
| automatic backups etc. I do think you are right; in the
| future there will be more infrastructure as code as cost
| pressures become more obvious.
| api wrote:
| Those benefits are at least partly lies though.
|
| The tooling -- K8S with all its YAML, Terraform, Docker,
| cloud CLI tools, etc. -- is pretty hideously ugly and
| complicated. I watch people struggle to beat it into shape
| just like they did with sysadmin automation tools like
| Puppet and Chef a decade or more ago. We have not removed
| complexity, only moved it.
|
| The auto scaling thing is a half truth. It can do this if
| you deploy correctly but the zero downtime promise is only
| true maybe half the time. It also does this at greatly
| inflated cost.
|
| Today you can scale with bare metal. Nobody except huge
| companies physically racks anymore. Companies like Hetzner
| and DataPacket have APIs to bring boxes up. There's a
| delay, but you solve that by a bit of over provisioning.
| Very very few companies have work loads that are so bursty
| and irregular that they need full limitless up and down
| scaling. That's one of those niche problems everyone thinks
| they have.
|
| The uptime promise is false in my experience. Cloud goes
| down for cluster upgrades and any myriad other reasons just
| as often as self managed stuff. I've seen serious unplanned
| outages with cloud too. I don't have hard numbers but I
| would definitely wager that if cloud is better for uptime
| at all it's not enough of an improvement to justify that
| gigantic markup.
|
| For what cloud charges I should, as the deploying user,
| receive five nines _without having to think about it ever._
| It does not deliver that, and it makes me think about it a
| lot with all the complexity.
|
| The only technical promise it makes good on, and it does do
| this well, is not losing data. They've clearly put more
| thought into that than any other aspect of the internal
| architecture. But there's other ways to not lose data that
| don't require you to pay a 10X markup on compute and a
| 10000X markup on transfer.
|
| I think the real selling point of cloud is blame.
|
| When cloud goes down, it's not your fault. You can blame
| the cloud provider.
|
| IT people like it, and it's usually not their money anyway.
| Companies like it. They're paying through the nose for the
| ability to tell the customer that the outage is Amazon's
| fault.
|
| Cloud took over during the ZIRP era anyway when money was
| infinite. If you have growth raise more. COGS doesn't
| matter.
|
| Maybe cloud is ZIRPslop.
| cestith wrote:
| Not all IaC is Kubernetes.
| icedchai wrote:
| With cloud, what you're really paying for is flexibility and
| scalability. You might not need either for your applications.
| At some startups, we needed it. We sized clusters wrong,
| needed to scale up in hours. This is something we wouldn't
| ever be able to do with our own hardware without tons of lead
| time.
|
| If your application won't ever require more resources than a
| single server or two, then you are better off looking at
| other alternatives.
| fridder wrote:
| Honestly I think the best path is hybrid with the cloud as DR
| and sudden load scaling.
| api wrote:
| Metal with data streamed to cloud and cloud as hot backup
| is something some people already do.
|
| If the metal dies in a catastrophic way (multiple nodes at
| once and loss of quorum, catastrophic DC outage, etc.) you
| spin it up in AWS.
| vasco wrote:
| But AWS beat the laptop? And there's no cost to performance
| analysis? Yes AWS is overpriced but how do you make that
| conclusion from this specific article? Because network disks
| were slower than SSDs? AWS also has SSD instances with local
| storage.
| mjlee wrote:
| I haven't tried the newer I7i and I8g instance types (the
| newest instances with local storage) for myself, but AWS
| claims "I7i instances offer up to 45TB of NVMe storage with
| up to 50% better real-time storage performance, up to 50%
| lower storage I/O latency, and up to 60% lower storage I/O
| latency variability compared to I4i instances."
|
| I benchmarked I4i at ~2GB/s read, so let's say I7i gets
| 3GB/s. The Verge benchmarked the 256GB Neo at 1.7GB/s read,
| and I'd expect the 512GB SSD to be faster than that.
|
| Of course, an application specific workload will have its own
| characteristics, but this has to be a win for a $700 device.
|
| It's hard to find a comparable AWS instance, and any general
| comparison is meaningless because everybody is looking at
| different aspects of performance and convenience. The
| cheapest I* is $125/mo on-demand, $55/mo if you pay for three
| years up front, $30/mo if you can work with spot instances.
| i8g.large is 468GB NVMe, 16GB, 2 vCPUs (proper cores on
| graviton instances, Intel/AMD instance headline numbers
| include hyperthreading).
| raincole wrote:
| The article is literally saying the opposite. Quote:
|
| > Here's the thing: if you are running Big Data workloads on
| your laptop every day, you probably shouldn't get the MacBook
| Neo.
|
| > All that said, if you run DuckDB in the cloud and primarily
| use your laptop as a client, this is a great device
| ipython wrote:
| Kinda comparing apples to oranges. AWS was using EBS and not
| local instance storage. So you're easily looking at another
| order of magnitude latency when transmitting data over the
| network versus a local pcie bus. That's gonna be a huge factor
| in what I assume is a heavy random seek load.
| mjlee wrote:
| I wrote a longer comment already
| (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47352526) but looking
| at the hot run performance and making big hand wavy guesses,
| the performance difference might not be as big as you'd
| expect.
| ody4242 wrote:
| I would have benchmarked with an instance that has local nvme,
| like c8gd.4xlarge.
| namibj wrote:
| Do they make any promises about persistence of local NVMe after
| something _like_ a full-region power outage yet? Because if you
| can 't do durable commit on a single-region cluster that will
| be just temporarily unavailable without loosing committed data
| if something like that happened, it's not quite there unless
| you still stream a WAL to storage that they do promise you will
| survive a full blackout of all zones that store (part of) the
| data.
| LunaSea wrote:
| You already lose your data after instance restart so I think
| that full region outage is already out of question.
| ody4242 wrote:
| Idk how an AWS region would respond to a power outage, but
| i have tested this in AWS Outpost, and there, if you power
| down a rack, then power it back again, the baremetal
| instances will not be recreated. (I was surprised as I was
| expecting the EC2 health check to terminate them, but it
| does not work like that.) My understanding is that if you
| stop/start an instance, your local storage is gone (as the
| instance might even end up in a different host), but if you
| just reboot the instance, it should keep the local storage.
| amluto wrote:
| Yes. They promise to wipe your data. That SLA has all the
| nines you can ask for as long as you measure it in the right
| direction :)
| devnotes77 wrote:
| Worth noting the c8gd local NVMe is ephemeral so you'd need to
| pre-stage the data each run, but for a benchmark like this
| that's actually ideal since you avoid EBS cold-read artifacts
| entirely.
| zipping1549 wrote:
| > TL;DR: How does the latest entry-level MacBook perform on
| database workloads? We benchmarked it to find out.
|
| That's not tldr, that's just subheader.
| coreyhn wrote:
| Thank you! I was going to say the same thing. It doesn't give
| mr an overview at all
| szarnyasg wrote:
| You're right! I pushed an updated TL;DR block.
| tosh wrote:
| For the TPC-DS results it would also have been nice to show how
| the macbook neo compares to the AWS instances.
|
| Or am I missing something?
| szarnyasg wrote:
| Indeed, it would have been interesting but I really wanted to
| get the blog post out on the launch day of the MacBook Neo and
| did not have the bandwidth to run additional cloud experiments.
|
| I ran TPC-DS SF300 now on the c6a.4xlarge. It turns out that
| it's still quite limited by the EBS disk's IO: while 32 GB
| memory is much more than 8 GB, DuckDB needs to spill to disk a
| lot and this shows on the runtimes. Running all 99 queries took
| 37 minutes, so about half of the MacBook's 79 minutes.
|
| > Command being timed: "duckdb tpcds-sf300.db -f bench.sql"
|
| > Percent of CPU this job got: 250%
|
| > Elapsed (wall clock) time (h:mm:ss or m:ss): 37:00.96
|
| > Maximum resident set size (kbytes): 25559652
| Robdel12 wrote:
| I've been tempted to buy one and do "real dev work" on it just to
| show people it's not this handicapped little machine.
|
| I built multiple iOS apps and went through two start up
| acquisitions with my M1 MBA as my primary computer, as a
| developer. And the neo is better than the M1 MBA. I edited my
| 30-45 min long 4k race videos in FCP on that air just fine.
| raegis wrote:
| Can you say a little more about what you mean by "better"? How
| much faster is editing?
| swiftcoder wrote:
| Better in terms of raw specs. The original M1 Air also came
| with 8GB of RAM, and the A18 Pro in the Neo is faster than
| the version of the M1 that shipped in the base model Air
| ramgine wrote:
| I just retired my m1 air to being a server this month. They're
| very capable laptops. If the neo is even comparable in spec
| it's excellent for the price
| mettamage wrote:
| I just bought a second hand M1 64GB as my main work laptop,
| haha. They definitely are capable laptops
| Robdel12 wrote:
| Yeah! My M1 air is now my iOS build server since GH actions
| bill macOS mins at 10x the price.
| bryanrasmussen wrote:
| why does GH actions bill macOS minis 10X?
| jzebedee wrote:
| Mins here being short for minutes, not minis.
| mikepurvis wrote:
| And, presumably for a combination of the Mac build (and
| hardware) being of niche interest and sitting outside the
| standard Linux workflows so it's annoying to administer.
| And serving a money-making audience (iOS app devs) who
| have a revenue stream and see the extra CI cost as worth
| it.
| UqWBcuFx6NV4r wrote:
| What is a macOS mini...
| NetMageSCW wrote:
| Not "mini", "mins" -> minutes.
| Robdel12 wrote:
| Ah sorry minutes, they bill the most for macOS probably
| because of what a pain it is to scale it with apples EULA
| (I'm guessing)
| https://docs.github.com/en/billing/reference/actions-
| runner-...
| bryanrasmussen wrote:
| ah ok, minutes makes more sense. thanks.
| gozzoo wrote:
| How do you use M1 Air as iOS build server. Is 8G sufficient
| for only doing iOS builds? Do you connect to it remotely?
|
| Couls you please describe your dev process.
| Robdel12 wrote:
| It works out pretty okay for me, I do it since GH runners
| are very expensive and I have my own hardware so why not.
| https://docs.github.com/en/actions/concepts/runners/self-
| hos...
|
| I setup a self hosted runner and then use that in my CI
| workflows. Then I disabled it from sleeping so it can
| clamshell forever and now it sits here in my living room
| silently workin' https://imgur.com/a/EaBICdo
| wincy wrote:
| My m1 air with 1TB ssd and 16GB of ram is a little champion,
| I use it during travel to play indie games like Hades II or
| Slay the Spire, and it works really well, better than my
| Steam Deck which broke. The only issue it really has is when
| I try to plug it into my docking station it struggles
| mightily with 2 2K screens and a 4K screen, so I just use my
| desktop in that case.
|
| I am jealous of my wife's 13" M5 iPad Pro though, that oled
| screen is gorgeous, a wonder of modern engineering.
| eru wrote:
| > [...] and it works really well, better than my Steam Deck
| which broke.
|
| Well, the MacBook Air was also a lot more expensive than
| the Steam Deck?
| Rohansi wrote:
| The M1 also consumes more power.
| rob wrote:
| It's starting to show its age, but I've been using a 2019
| MacBook Pro with the Intel chip and 16GB of memory. Still
| handles multiple terminal sessions with Claude Code and Codex
| simultaneously, building in Xcode, running Docker in the
| background, etc.
|
| (Maybe the fans sometimes sound like they're a jet engine
| taking off...)
|
| Finally just put an order in for a new 16" MBP M5 Max with 48GB
| memory only because it looks like they're going to stop
| supporting the Intel stuff this year and no more software
| updates. It'll probably be obsolete in six months with the rate
| things are going, but I've been averaging seven years between
| upgrades so it should be good!
| Robdel12 wrote:
| Oh my. All I have to say is cherish the first week of your M*
| experience. :D When I got rid of my intel MBP (it was an i7)
| for my MBA it was astonishing how fast and smooth it was.
|
| So, the m5 with 48gb of ram will be amazing.
| cipehr wrote:
| I agree. It was utterly ridiculous how noticeable the
| improvement was. I was doing z3 solving for ICFP contest
| the first couple weeks after getting the m1 air. And it was
| consistently smoking my teammates maxed out i7 MBP
| swiftcoder wrote:
| Hah. yeah. I went from a 64GB i9 to a 32GB M2, and it was
| night and fucking day
| eru wrote:
| Well, Claude Cod and Codex should be doing most of their
| heavy lifting in the cloud?
| amonith wrote:
| Sort of, they have no "hands", LLMs can only respond that
| they want to execute a tool/command. So they do that a lot
| to: read files, search for things, compile projects, run
| tests, run other arbitrary commands, fetch stuff from the
| internet etc.
|
| Obviously the LLM inference is super heavy, but the actual
| work / task at hand is being executed on the device.
| exe34 wrote:
| yeah I run Claude code on a 2013 Mac book air that refuses
| to die, I don't think it's very compute heavy.
| coldtea wrote:
| The AI part yes. But they also use quite inefficient
| rendering on the cli.
| ghaff wrote:
| I use a 2015 MacBook Pro all the time--like right now. It
| does have 16GB of memory. It's what sits on my dining room
| table where I do most of my writing/browsing and which I take
| for travel. I do have an Apple Silicon MacBook Pro in my
| office but my downstairs "office" is a lot lighter and
| airier.
| reaperducer wrote:
| _I use a 2015 MacBook Pro all the time--like right now._
|
| I have a 2010 MacBook Air that I still use when traveling.
|
| The battery is completely shot, but it works fine when
| plugged in. And if I'm on the road, I don't use my computer
| until I get to the hotel anyway. And even then, it's just
| fine for e-mail, browsing, and even Photoshop.
| ghaff wrote:
| I think this one had a battery replacement because it was
| bulging. But it's definitely in the class of devices
| that, if it gets swiped or lost, is basically in the
| <ehh> category as opposed to my newer one.
|
| Am probably giving newish iPad and magnetic keyboard a
| spin on my next trip mostly to see how it goes.
| qingcharles wrote:
| I have one of these (it's my only Mac), but it only has
| 2GB of RAM, so it's kinda rough. I tried Mint on it, but
| IIRC it might not have the GPU drivers? I just bought it
| a new SSD which helped a bit.
| conception wrote:
| Try running Teams on it though!
| oldandboring wrote:
| Former employee of mine had the 2019 MBP as well. After a few
| years he had the same problem with the fans -- if you haven't
| already, pop it open and clean the fans and vents. You'll
| probably need a little brush along with compressed air. Lots
| of stuff comes up on Google. Great machine btw. Good luck!
| ayewo wrote:
| Thanks for this tip! The fans of mine have been spinning up
| regularly, especially noticeable when I upgraded to Tahoe a
| few days ago.
| pauljonas wrote:
| Still using that 2019 MBP (16 inch, 16G memory) as a daily
| work machine.
|
| Is still handling the load well, though at times, fans get
| quite loud, especially with all the background processes and
| VM setups.
|
| Hope to get a new MBP this year, as being on Intel means lots
| of software that won't run on it (ie, Codex app for example,
| won't run on Intel Macs)
| tjoff wrote:
| It will do real work fine. But slack and a browser will bring
| it to its knees.
| boutell wrote:
| Only if you insist on running the standalone slack app for
| some reason. Why run one instance of Chrome when you can pay
| for two?
| mikepurvis wrote:
| I've been finding it hard to wean myself off the standalone
| app but another major reason to do so is opening threads in
| separate tabs. I find as soon as I'm involved in two or
| more conversations on there it's super easy to start losing
| track of things.
| Aurornis wrote:
| I have an older 8GB MacBook Air. This is false. I routinely
| have Slack, Chrome, iTerm, Visual Studio Code, and more open
| on it. It's fine.
|
| Those apps don't need every single byte of memory you see in
| Activity Monitor to be active in RAM all of the time. The OS
| swaps out unused parts to the very fast SSD. If you push it
| so far that active pages are constantly being swapped out as
| apps compete then you start to notice, but the threshold for
| that is a lot higher than HN comments seem to think.
| tjoff wrote:
| It really isn't. It is a capable machine but modern
| software has made it a lemon. And that is the only reason
| apple sells it. So that whoever buys it needs to buy
| another one prematurely, generating another sale.
|
| Everything from apple to modern software is rotten to its
| core.
| mikestew wrote:
| _It really isn 't._
|
| ...in reply to someone who just said their experience is
| fine, and included details. If you just want to rant
| about Apple, have at it, but you're going to have to do
| better than "nuh, uh" if you want to be convincing.
| tjoff wrote:
| Well I could say that it isn't enough for vscode alone.
| And I'd be right. It all depends on how and what you use
| vscode for.
|
| 8GB really shouldn't be an option in 2026, it is just
| shortsighted and an insanely uneven build.
|
| I could rant about Dell too. Or most other manufacturers
| (surprise, greed isn't apple exclusive). But Apple at
| least tries to keep the appearance of a higher profile.
| mikestew wrote:
| _Well I could say that it isn 't enough for vscode alone.
| And I'd be right. It all depends on how and what you use
| vscode for._
|
| Fair enough; though experience says 8Gb will run VScode,
| it would very much depend on the use case, I agree. OTOH,
| I would argue that anyone working VScode that hard
| probably isn't buying 8Gb machines, but OP did say
| they're running it so it's up for discussion.
| skybrian wrote:
| Maybe if you have 100 browser tabs or something silly like
| that?
| alpaca128 wrote:
| A couple YouTube tabs are enough if you leave them running
| for long enough. Just one YT browser process will easily
| take up 1-4GB sooner or later.
| NetMageSCW wrote:
| Or it won't because Chrome and MacOS will know how much
| RAM is available and manage it effectively.
| alpaca128 wrote:
| I am talking from experience with an M1 & 8GB RAM. I had
| to restart either the browser or the YouTube browser
| processes at least once every couple days to stop the
| whole system from lagging.
| bluedino wrote:
| A couple Facebook Marketplace tabs that have videos of
| the item for sale would absolutely crush my 2017 MacBook
| Pro.
|
| My M1 Air would slow down a little, but was still usable
| doing the same thing. And they both had 8GB of memory.
| yohannparis wrote:
| While I agree with your statement, I don't think judging
| one's way of working and using their computer was
| necessary.
| eru wrote:
| I could have two browser windows open in the late 1990s. I
| have about a thousand times as much RAM now. So even with
| 10x more bloat in the pages, I should be able to open 200
| tabs just fine.
| UqWBcuFx6NV4r wrote:
| I'm sick to death of this. It's so devoid from reality in
| 2026 that I see it as a lowest common denominator populist
| political catchphrase more than any legitimate contributor to
| any conversation. My min spec MacBook Pro from 6 years ago
| doesn't flinch at this, and it barely flinches at a whole lot
| more.
|
| Can we please just move on? Maybe get your hardware checked
| if you're legitimately still having these issues.
| tjoff wrote:
| Trust me, so am I. And I am dead serious.
| NetMageSCW wrote:
| You don't have an 8GB Apple Silicon MacBook, so you? So why
| did you post?
| MikeNotThePope wrote:
| It's fine to if you don't have any memory hogging apps. But as
| soon as you fire up a couple demanding Docker containers you'll
| feel the pain. 8GB isn't so much RAM for some applications.
| NetMageSCW wrote:
| Why do you think people buying the cheapest MacBook available
| will be running Docket? Do you commonly run Docker containers
| on the cheapest Windows laptop available? Why not?
| ajross wrote:
| > I've been tempted to buy one and do "real dev work" on it
| just to show people it's not this handicapped little machine.
|
| But... you can do the same exercise with a $350 windows thing.
| Everyone knows you can do "real dev work" on it, because "real
| dev work" isn't a performance case anymore, hasn't been for
| like a decade now, and anyone who says otherwise is just a snob
| wanting an excuse to expense a $4k designer fashion accessory.
|
| IMHO the important questions to answer are business side: will
| this displace sales of $350 windows machines or not, and
| (critically) will it displace sales of $1.3k Airs?
|
| HN always wants to talk about the technical stuff, but the
| technical stuff here isn't really interesting. The MacBook Neo
| is indeed the best laptop you can get for $6-700.
|
| But that's a weird price point in the market right now, as it
| underperforms the $1k "business laptops" (to avoid
| cannibalizing Air sales) and sits well above the "value laptop"
| price range.
| prmph wrote:
| No, you can't do real work on a $350 windows machine. No way
| such a setup is suitable for anything beyond browsing a tab
| or two and connecting to servers using SSH.
|
| And, the whole shittiness of the experience will even
| distract you attempting real work: the horrible touchpad, the
| bad screen, the forced windows updates when you trying to
| start the machine to do something urgent, ads in Windows, the
| lack of proper programmability of Windows (unless you use
| WSL).... Add the fact that the toy is likely to break in a
| year or two. These issue exist on far more expensive Windows
| machines, how much more a $350 machine.
|
| Leaving Windows machines and OS behind for more than a decade
| has been a continuing breath of fresh air. I have several
| issues with the Apple devices and macOS (as I have with Linux
| too), but on the whole they are far better than Windows. The
| only good thing about Windows that I miss on Macs is the file
| explorer and window management, not sure why Apple stubbornly
| refuses to copy those.
| cosmic_cheese wrote:
| A lot of $350-ish Windows machines also don't have SSDs but
| instead eMMC storage, which is dog slow and will make
| modern SSD-mandatory Windows feel even more awful to use.
|
| If Windows/Linux/x86 is non-negotiable and that's your
| budget, I would never in a million years recommend anything
| brand new. This is when you go pick up a $350 used midrange
| ThinkPad on eBay. It won't outperform a Neo in terms of CPU
| and battery life but I guarantee it'll be a better
| experience than the garbage routinely sold at this price
| point.
| ajross wrote:
| > No, you can't do real work on a $350 windows machine.
|
| Sigh. I mean, even absent the obvious answers[1], that's
| just wrong anyway. You're being a snob. Want to run WSL?
| Run WSL. Want to run vscode natively? Ditto. Put it on a
| cheap TV and run your graphical layout and 3D modelling
| work. I mean, obviously it does all that stuff. _OBVIOUSLY_
| , because that stuff is all cheap and easy.
|
| All the complaining you're doing is about preference, not
| capability. You're being a snob. Which is hardly weird,
| we're all snobs about something.
|
| But snobs aren't going to buy the Neo either. Again, the
| business question here is whether the $350 junk users can
| be convinced to be snobs for $600.
|
| [1] "Put Linux on it", "All of your stuff is in the cloud
| anyway", "It's still a thousand times faster than the
| machine on which I did my best work", etc...
| NetMageSCW wrote:
| You mean that machine from 30 years ago that was running
| 30 year old software that has nothing in common with
| today's development? And how well does Linux run on 4GB?
| ajross wrote:
| So weird to see this kind of flaming more than a decade
| after it got stale and silly. I mean, yeah, kinda: a 64MB
| K6-300 was pretty great!
|
| But as to the 4G quip, that's showing some ignorance of
| where the market is. The value segment is filled with
| devices like this: https://www.amazon.com/HP-Stream-
| BrightView-N4120-Graphics/d...
|
| That's a 16G windows box which will happily run multiple
| VMs for whatever your deployment environment is,
| something the Neo is actually going to struggle with. The
| Jasper Lake CPU is indeed awfully slow, but again for
| routine "dev" tasks that's just not a limit.
|
| You would obviously refuse out of taste, but if you were
| actually forced to use this machine to do your job... you
| absolutely could.
| mkesper wrote:
| But this has no real SSD. Back to external SSD like on
| Apple devices?
| chocochunks wrote:
| Of course you can. You can do real work on an $80 Amazon
| Fire. Yes, some things will be potentially impossible or
| frustrating but that's also true of the MacBook Neo, just a
| bit higher of a bar. A lot of this also depends on your
| definition of "real work".
|
| $350 USD can get you a decent laptop with a SSD, 16GB RAM
| and something like an Intel N100 or N95. And they pretty
| comparable to a decent Intel Skylake CPU which are still
| pretty usable.
|
| https://www.amazon.com/NIAKUN-Computer-Processor-Keyboard-
| Fi...
|
| https://www.amazon.com/AOC-Computer-Processor-Laptops-
| Window...
|
| Yes, the Neo has a faster CPU but it also has less RAM and
| less storage and costs more and has less ports. Besides ray
| traced games what can the Neo do that the others can't?
| They'll take longer but they'll get there.
|
| And if you're willing to go used? That $350 goes a lot
| further.
| prmph wrote:
| > Yes, the Neo has a faster CPU but it also has less RAM
| and less storage and costs more and has less ports.
|
| 8GB on Apple Silicon is far better than 16 GB on Wintel,
| and I don't event trust the quality of 16GB of RAM on a
| bottom of the barrel Windows machine.
|
| Would you prefer a machine that is still good 7 years
| from now with less ports, or one with more ports that you
| have to replace in 2 years? Yes it is more expensive
| _now_ , but over 7 years it is an absolute bargain.
| chocochunks wrote:
| 16 GB physical RAM is just better. Apple isn't magic.
| Gimme a break. Both devices have SSDs for fast swapping
| and have RAM compression. You can't spin up a VM that has
| 8GB RAM on the Neo, you can't load a large spreadsheet or
| do a decently sized digital painting. I could maybe buy a
| claim that 8GB is better on Mac than 8GB on Windows.
|
| Why would you have to replace it in 2 years? How do we
| know Apple will even be offering updates to Neo in 7
| years? Will 8GB still be usable in 7 years really? 8GB is
| barely on the fence already.
|
| I wouldn't be surprised if Apple drops the Neo from
| software support in less than 7 years.
| clouedoc wrote:
| I know it's not really related, but how did you manage to build
| two startups worth getting acquired in such a short period of
| time?
| tkfoss wrote:
| Doubt this is getting answered :)
| Robdel12 wrote:
| Just did :p
| Robdel12 wrote:
| Oh that made it seem like I was the driving factor. Maybe for
| the first one (Percy.io) I can claim a large part of that
| success (owning the SDKs and support end to end).
|
| The other I just owned the front end infra and was on the
| growth team. The rest of the folks were the stars on that
| one.
|
| Edit: I guess I brought that up because I guess I don't know
| any more "real work" that that, ha. What is 'real work'?
| anthonySs wrote:
| most dev workflows from pre 2021 can probably run just fine on
| a NEO - i think once you get into conductor / 8 terminals with
| claude code territory that's where things start to slow down
|
| i just got an m5 max with 128gb of ram specifically to run
| local llms
| eru wrote:
| Does Claude Code take up that many local resources? I thought
| the heavy lifting was in the cloud?
| ElectricalUnion wrote:
| Claude Code still runs things on your local machine. So if
| you have some pretty expensive transpilation, or resolving
| dependency trees that needs musl recompilation, or doing
| something rust, you still need a reasonable ammount of
| local firepower. More so if you're running multiple
| instances of them.
| Robdel12 wrote:
| Heh, I also upgraded to run local LLMs. As a tiny aside,
| codex does not burn resources like CC does.
| asow92 wrote:
| I'm still doing iOS dev on my 2020 M1 MPB, and it's fine! I
| expect that if I change out its battery and apply new thermal
| paste it would run for another 6 years.
| embedding-shape wrote:
| > I built multiple iOS apps and went through two start up
| acquisitions with my M1 MBA as my primary computer, as a
| developer. And the neo is better than the M1 MBA. I edited my
| 30-45 min long 4k race videos in FCP on that air just fine.
|
| Before I was a professional software developer, I used a
| scrawny second-hand laptop with a Norwegian keyboard (I'm not
| Norwegian) because that was what I could afford:
| https://i.imgur.com/1NRIZrg.jpeg
|
| This was the computer I was developing PHP backends on + jQuery
| frontends, and where I published a bunch of projects that
| eventually led to me getting my first software development job,
| in a startup, and discovering HN pretty much my first day on
| the job :)
|
| The actual hardware you use seems to me like it matters the
| least, when it comes to actually being able to do things.
| throwawaytea wrote:
| I still manage and develop my php/jquery saas product on a
| 2011 27" iMac running Linux Mint, with an SSD being the only
| upgrade. Runs better than most new windows machines. No
| complaints.
| sam_lowry_ wrote:
| I switch between Thinkpad T420s and PineBook Pro for all
| the hobby work.
|
| T420s has loose USB ports and the power socket is almost
| falling off, so I plan to replace it by a 5 years old T14
| G2 in the coming months.
|
| I can afford the latest MacBook, but I'd rather not
| generate more e-waste that there is, and more importantly I
| feel closer to my users, and my code is efficient and
| straight to the point.
|
| My non-hobby laptop is an old cheap Dell from 5-6 years
| ago.
|
| The best laptop I ever had was a maxed-out Thinkpad P7x,
| and it came with the most meaningless job ever.
|
| I can only compare that job to the one at a unicorn that
| gave me the latest and greatest MacBook. Not only the job
| was meaningless, the whole industry made no sense to me.
| madaxe_again wrote:
| I started my business back in 2006 with an ancient 306 laptop
| - it was practically free, it ran VIM just fine, and that was
| all I needed it to do to crank out PHP until the cows came
| home.
| bluedino wrote:
| I wrote 99% of a large PHP app on an six year old laptop with
| a single 17" LCD. Meanwhile, at my desk, I had a Dell
| workstation with 3 monitors at the time, but it was easier to
| squirrel away in a corner somewhere, undisturbed.
|
| After all, the actual server ran the code, I just needed text
| editors, terminal windows, and web browsers.
| sheiyei wrote:
| Your hardware matters quite a bit if you're doing lower level
| things and the architecture is not the same as you're
| developing for. But apparently HN is all web devs
| antonyh wrote:
| It would have been a better fit for me than the M4 Air, I
| literally use it only for typing and browsing, plus a could of
| Mac-only tools. Brilliant machine but complete overkill for me.
| It's almost tempting to switch just to get rid of the display
| notch.
| internet2000 wrote:
| I'm glad enough people got M1 MacBook Airs now that the broader
| sentiment within the commentariat is changing and people are
| pushing back on the dismissals.
|
| 8gb has ALWAYS been fine in Apple Silicon Mac OS. RAM usage on
| a fresh boot is a meaningless statistic (unused RAM is wasted
| RAM). And they're just plain capable!
| ryukoposting wrote:
| I was doing Android development and Verilog synthesis on a
| mobile Nehalem i5 in 2020. That machine is still totally
| adequate for anything a "normal person" does with their
| computer, provided they have good tab hygeine. The reality is
| that (unless you play video games and/or you want local LLM
| inference) the demands people place on their computers haven't
| changed significantly in at least 10 years.
| devmor wrote:
| The argument is misrepresented - I think it's about frustration
| and convenience, not achievability.
|
| I developed some work that keeps tens of thousands of people
| alive every day on a $100 Acer netbook almost 15 years ago. The
| tools are always there, I don't think anyone thinks the work is
| actually impossible to do on a limited machine.
| ge96 wrote:
| Would say get one with a fan, my small react native app
| building/indexing in xcode takes several minutes on a 2020 M1
| macbook air
|
| But damn I like that design
| allenu wrote:
| I was using a M1 Mac Mini and only 8GB of RAM on it to build
| iOS apps for maybe a year. It's absolutely doable, though it
| very noticeably gets a little less snappy when building
| projects. When building in Xcode and then switching to Firefox
| to browse for instance, I could tell it took slightly longer to
| switch tabs and YouTube playback would occasionally stutter if
| too much was happening.
|
| I also was using an Intel MacBook Pro with 16GB at the time.
| Doing the same thing there was much smoother and snappier. On
| the whole, it actually made me want to just the laptop instead
| since it "felt" nicer. (This isn't measuring build times or
| anything like that, just snappiness of the OS.)
| dracyr wrote:
| I just spent vacation deciding not to bring a laptop, but to
| use my android phone (a galaxy s22) with a hdmi adapter and
| Bluetooth travel keyboard. Plugged it in to the TV in our
| accomodation and had a lot of fun.
|
| Running neovim on termux was fine. Developing elixir was no
| problem, the test suite took 5s on my phone, and takes 1s on my
| laptop. Rust and cargo compiling was slow enough that I didn't
| really enjoy it though.
|
| Meant that I could just pack up instantly and have an agent do
| review workflows while I was out and about as well in my
| pocket, and didn't really notice a big battery hit.
| nabakin wrote:
| And nowadays we have Debian running in a VM on Android [1]
|
| [1] https://www.zdnet.com/article/how-to-use-the-new-linux-
| termi...
| steve_adams_86 wrote:
| I don't really enjoy compiling rust on my M2 Pro, so I
| wouldn't necessarily blame the phone
| Robdel12 wrote:
| Local LLMs and compiling rust are the only two things that
| I have seen saturate my M4 Max, hahaha.
| sheiyei wrote:
| Interesting vacation activities.
| harrisi wrote:
| I wrote a fix for node that got upstreamed a few years ago on a
| Lenovo Thinkpad 3 Chromebook. I'm actually commenting from it
| now. It's not a workhorse by any means, but for $99, it's not
| bad. A 1.1GHz Celeron processor with 4GB of memory is able to
| compile projects like node, python, Erlang, etc. without much
| hassle. It just takes a lunch break :)
|
| Any modern Mac is more than capable. I had the baseline M1
| Macbook Air that I did work on as well, just to see how that
| fared. Much better than this machine - 10x the price, but more
| than 10x the performance. This one is great as a "I don't mind
| if I break it or lose it" device.
| jorvi wrote:
| People usually forget 8GB isn't 8GB. Memory compression means
| you can store ~2x (lz4) to 3x (zstd) as much data in memory as
| ordinarily. And in the worst case, reading swap from disk
| (writes don't matter as they can be predicted) is so much
| faster with NVMe SSDs.
|
| The worst corner they cut is no keyboard backlighting. That
| saves them what, $1 BoM per MacBook Neo? Especially because now
| they have to put up an entire new keyboard production line
| instead of just piggybacking off of the Air keyboard production
| line.
| refulgentis wrote:
| > just to show people it's not this handicapped little machine
|
| I used to think this way about Apple and its jarring to read
| with it 10-15 years behind me.
|
| It reads as aggro and oddly tribalistic / sports fan-y.
|
| (what people? who thinks its slower than an M1? who thinks you
| can't code on it? what will you coding on it prove to these
| people that the benchmarks they read can't? with all that, why
| get so invested you're buying a machine you don't want to use
| day to day? what does "handicapped" mean in this context?)
|
| Only sharing b/c I never understood why people would roll their
| eyes at me, and apparently I finally reached my own graybeard
| moment, and I am now rolling my eyes at both of my selves :)
| ramgale wrote:
| Seems completely unnecessary, there is probably 0 overlap between
| people who buy a cheap MacBook and people running DuckDB locally
| ExxKA wrote:
| I love small form factors, and I am what youd call a
| professionel :P
| leoedin wrote:
| I think the form factor is basically the same (maybe slightly
| thicker) as a Macbook Air. It's basically an Air with lower
| performance in most dimensions.
| swiftcoder wrote:
| I've used MacBook Airs as primary dev machines multiple times
| in my career (before Apple silicon, when Airs had truly shit
| performance).
|
| There is always a trade-off of cost/convenience/power, and some
| folks are going to end up the the Neo end of the spectrum.
| NetMageSCW wrote:
| It's necessary because the ignorant keep saying 8GB of RAM is a
| deal breaking limitation on the cheapest MacBook available.
| dartharva wrote:
| You'd be surprised. There are many of us analysts in the third
| world who are paid pennies _and_ expected to build large-scale
| exec dashboards from nontrivial data - with no cloud support
| whatsoever. ETL has to be local from hundreds of GBs of csv
| dumps.
| MBCook wrote:
| I agree I don't think it's going to be something people really
| do.
|
| I just thought it was neat. It's a phone chip, we've never been
| able to do stuff like this on an Apple phone chip before. No
| one was porting this to the iPhone to run there.
|
| In my mind this is purely a curiosity article, and I like that.
| TacticalCoder wrote:
| I'm interested by one (not for big data) but only 8 GB or RAM is
| kinda really sad.
|
| My good old LG Gram (from 2017? 2015? don't even remember)
| already had 24 GB of RAM. That was 10 years ago.
|
| A decade later I cannot see myself being a laptop with 1/3rd the
| mem.
| maratc wrote:
| Did your LG Gram cost $450 (to make for $600 in today's money)
| in 2015-17?
|
| If it didn't, Apple has other laptops today with more RAM.
| refactor_master wrote:
| I think it's relevant to first read [1] to see why they're doing
| this. It's basically done as a meme.
|
| [1] https://motherduck.com/blog/big-data-is-dead/
| mazzma wrote:
| > An alternate definition of Big Data is "when the cost of
| keeping data around is less than the cost of figuring out what
| to throw away."
|
| That couldn't be more accurate
| clamlady wrote:
| as a broke ecologist, this little computer can do everything I
| need in R and word and is a phenomenal build for the price. I'm
| really enjoying it thus far.
| pbronez wrote:
| How did you get one already? I thought they were just up for
| pre-order
| cluckindan wrote:
| Shipping started yesterday, meaning preorders would already
| have arrived then
| clamlady wrote:
| yea, preordered.
| chronogram wrote:
| Mine started shipping on 8 March to arrive on the 11 March
| release date.
| steve_adams_86 wrote:
| I take it you're researching clams? Or you happen to like clams
| a lot?
|
| Where I live, our government-funded clam research programs are
| mostly shutting down. Very sad.
| varispeed wrote:
| If you can fit it on a thumb drive, it's not Big Data.
| nicoritschel wrote:
| > compared to 3-5 GB/s
|
| Their numbers are a bit outdated. M5 Macbook pro SSDs are
| literally 5x this speed. It's wild.
| jsheard wrote:
| I'm seeing ~6GB/sec:
| https://www.tomshardware.com/laptops/macbooks/m5-macbook-pro...
|
| That's decently fast but not especially remarkable, most Gen4
| NVMe drives can hit 6-7GB/sec.
| lowkj wrote:
| To be clear, that article is about the base m5, not the m5
| pro or m5 max.
|
| https://www.apple.com/newsroom/2026/03/apple-introduces-
| macb...
|
| "The new MacBook Pro delivers up to 2x faster read/write
| performance compared to the previous generation reaching
| speeds of up to 14.5GB/s..."
| jsheard wrote:
| OP did just say M5 (implying the base model)
|
| Those speeds on the Pro/Max are impressive though, more in
| line with Gen5 NVMe drives. Those have been available in
| desktops for some time but AFAIK the controllers are still
| much too hot and power hungry for laptops, so I think
| Apple's custom controller is actually the first to
| practically hit those speeds on mobile.
| hu3 wrote:
| Interesting. Do you have a link?
| onlyrealcuzzo wrote:
| This is awesome.
|
| I wish more companies would do showcases like this of what kind
| of load you can expect from commodity-ish hardware.
| tasuki wrote:
| That's not Big Data. If you "need to process Big Data on the
| move" - what you need is a network.
| red-iron-pine wrote:
| aye.
|
| the laptop is gonna have some local code, maybe a lot, but if
| I'm doing legitimate "big data" that data is living i the cloud
| somewhere, and the laptop is just my interface.
| __mharrison__ wrote:
| When I teach, I use "big data" for data that won't fit in a
| single machine. "Small data" fits on a single machine in memory
| and medium data on disk.
|
| Having said that duckDB is awesome. I recently ported a 20 year
| old Python app to modern Python. I made the backend swappable,
| polars or duckdb. Got a 40-80x speed improvement. Took 2 days.
| ladberg wrote:
| I'm curious - what were you doing that polars was leaving a
| 40-80x speedup on the table? I've been happy with it's speed
| when held correctly, but it's certainly easy to hold it
| incorrectly and kill your perf if you're not careful
| devnotes77 wrote:
| Polars is fastest when you avoid eager eval mid-pipeline. If
| you see a 40x gap it's often from calling .collect() inside a
| loop or applying Python UDFs row-wise.
| __mharrison__ wrote:
| App is now lazy!
| dartharva wrote:
| Might be tangential but in my recent experience polars kept
| crashing the python server with OOM errors whenever I tried
| to stream data from and into large parquet files with some
| basic grouping and aggregation.
|
| Claude suggested to just use DuckDB instead and indeed, it
| made short work of it.
| __mharrison__ wrote:
| 20 year old BI app. Columnar DBs weren't really a thing.
| (MonetDB was brand new but not super stable. I committed the
| SQLAlchemy interface to it.)
| ElectricalUnion wrote:
| The funny thing is that those days you can fit 64 TB of DDR5 in
| a single physical system (IBM Power Server), so almost all non
| data-lake-class data is "Small data".
| AlotOfReading wrote:
| And a single machine can hold petabytes of disk for medium
| scale. There aren't many datasets exceeding that outside
| fundamental physics.
| crowcroft wrote:
| A bit of a moving target there, especially with the definition
| of medium data on disk considering the rise of high speed NVMe
| vs spinning metal. Makes me wonder if the 00s 'Big Data' era
| and the resulting infra is largely just outdated now...
| aaronharnly wrote:
| That c8g.metal-48xl instance costs $7.63008 on demand[1], so for
| the price of the laptop, you could run queries on it for about
| ~90 hours.
|
| :shrug: as to whether that makes the laptop or the giant instance
| the better place to do one's work...
|
| [1] https://aws.amazon.com/ec2/pricing/on-demand/
| alex_creates wrote:
| Funny just yesterday I almost bought one but got cold feet and
| opted for a low range MacBook with M5 chip. The Apple sales rep
| was not convinced it would be enough when i described using it
| for vibecoding and deploying so kind of talked me out of getting
| the Neo. I normally use a mix of LLMs, then connect to Github and
| do a one-click deploy on CreateOS. Do you think I over-reacted?
| The price of the Neo is SO attractive, a clean half price
| compared to what I got.
| alpaca128 wrote:
| Imho 8GB RAM for productivity can quickly be restrictive. I
| used an M1 with 8GB and my current Macbook is M2 with 16GB, and
| to me the difference feels bigger than 2x. It seems not
| everyone here feels that way, but I'd say there's a reason
| Apple bumped the base models to 16 and makes that exclusive to
| non-Neo models.
| kingnothing wrote:
| Why do you need an M5 to run Cursor and a browser? Your laptop
| isn't doing anything in your described workflow.
| NetMageSCW wrote:
| If you have doubts and you have the money, why worry about it?
| MBCook wrote:
| I think you'll be quite a bit happier. Between the quality of
| life stuff like the ancient life sensor, the pure quality stuff
| like a better screen and speakers, and extra RAM so it lasts
| longer that seems like a good decision.
|
| The Neo is neat and for someone who mostly does surfing and
| standard office work kind of stuff I suspect it's a pretty
| great little laptop for way less than Apple usually charges.
|
| But it's not going to compete with an M5 anything.
| 1a527dd5 wrote:
| I adore DuckDB.
|
| Did a PoC on a AWS Lambda for data that was GZ'ed in a s3 bucket.
|
| It was able to replace about 400 C# LoC with about 10 lines.
|
| Amazing little bit of kit.
| evanjrowley wrote:
| >Can I expect good performance from the MacBook Neo with Slack,
| Microsoft Office, and Google Chrome signed into Atlassian and a
| CRM, all running simultaneously?
|
| No.
|
| >Do I reject a world where all of the above is necessary to
| realize value from an entry-level MacBook?
|
| In theory, yes.
| devnotes77 wrote:
| The DuckDB team benchmarked with an r7i.16xlarge which uses EBS -
| that's the expected bottleneck. A fairer comparison would be an
| i4i or c8gd with local NVMe, where you'd likely see the laptop
| and cloud instance much closer in practice.
| amluto wrote:
| On a MacBook, one can download a data set, reboot, install
| updates, etc and still have the dataset. Those nice-ish AWS
| instances will wipe their local storage if they are stopped.
| Sure, one needs backups, but this is still annoying.
|
| Also, at on-demand prices, three months of continuous usage of
| a single c8gd.2xlarge will pay for that MacBook Neo. The
| MacBook Neo has a larger SSD than the AWS instances. To be
| fair, the MacBook Neo has seriously nerfed external IO
| bandwidth, so the c8gd.2xlarge will outperform it in
| networking. That being said, I think that any other Mac in the
| current lineup will utterly smoke c8gd.2xlarge if you are
| willing to use Thunderbolt-connected network adapters.
|
| Given how little power modern Macs use, a little closet full of
| Macs with a decent network switch will easily run on a single
| 20A circuit and will perform better than quite a few thousands
| of dollars per month of AWS products. Sadly, you're kind of
| stuck on MacOS (which is not actually a fantastic server OS)
| and the management tools are poor. Oh, well.
| fnord77 wrote:
| this has a phone CPU/memory
| pella wrote:
| other test:
|
| 2025-09-08 : "Big Data on the Move: DuckDB on the Framework
| Laptop 13"
|
| _" TL;DR: We put DuckDB through its paces on a 12-core ultrabook
| with 128 GB RAM, running TPC-H queries up to SF10,000."_
|
| https://duckdb.org/2025/09/08/duckdb-on-the-framework-laptop...
| scottlamb wrote:
| > The cloud instances have network-attached disks
|
| Props for identifying the issue immediately, but armed with that
| knowledge, why not redo the benchmark on a different instance
| type that has local storage? E.g. why not try a `c8id.2xlarge` or
| `c8id.4xlarge` (which bracket the `c6a.4xlarge`'s cost)?
| hirako2000 wrote:
| Would it not also work on a raspberry.
|
| With I/O streaming and efficient transformation I do big data on
| my consumer PC and good old cheap HDDs just fine.
| MBCook wrote:
| I suspect the Neo's A-series chip wipes the floor with a Pi.
|
| I'm really surprised just how competitive it was in their
| benchmark. I was expecting "sure it doesn't compete but it
| works and you can use it", not "it beat an Amazon instance,
| though not a really powerful one".
| tonymet wrote:
| IO on a raspi is pathetic. As packaged it's 100 times slower ,
| with a M.2 hat it's still 5x slower
| tonymet wrote:
| "Big data" doesn't have a 5gb memory cap.
|
| I'm guessing so many devs started out on 32gb MacBooks that the
| NEO seems underpowered. but it wasn't too long ago that 8gb,
| 1500mb/sec IO & so many cores was an elite machine.
|
| I did a lot of dev work on a glorified eePC Chromebook when my
| laptop was damaged. You don't need a lot of ram to run a
| terminal.
|
| I'm hoping NEO resets the baseline testing environment so
| developers get back to shipping software that doesn't monopolize
| resources. "Plays nice with others" should be part of the
| software developer's creed.
| _glass wrote:
| Set up the machine yesterday. Everything runs just fine. Will use
| it mainly for academic writing, and light development work, only
| conceptual work, PoCs.
| haolez wrote:
| This might be a buy for me once it is fully supported by Linux.
| Hopefully, the muscle memory of Ctrl, Super and Alt won't get in
| my way.
| kroaton wrote:
| If SPTM is active on the chip, we are not going to be getting
| Linux at all.
| elAhmo wrote:
| Hah, I wish people who are saying 'can you even do anything with
| 8GB in 2026' would read posts like this.
| hudtaylor wrote:
| I run a full AI operations stack on an M4 Mac Mini -- ClawdBot
| (Claude), OBS streaming a 24/7 WebGL simulation, Chrome for
| browser automation, 16 cron jobs, the whole thing. $599 machine.
|
| Reality check: it works remarkably well for AI agent
| orchestration. The unified memory architecture means the agent,
| browser, and streaming can coexist without the memory wall you'd
| hit on x86. But running OBS alongside everything else does make
| it laggy -- I've got an M5 MacBook Air (32GB) incoming and I'm
| planning to swap the Mini for a 64GB model to give more headroom.
|
| For anyone considering Apple Silicon as an AI dev machine: the
| sweet spot is 64GB unified memory minimum if you want to run an
| agent + browser automation + anything else simultaneously. 32GB
| works but you feel the pressure. The M-series efficiency means
| you can leave it running 24/7 without worrying about your power
| bill, which matters when your AI agent literally never sleeps.
| joe_mamba wrote:
| What does your AI agent do on it?
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