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Apple's cheapest laptop beat a cloud server with 4x the memory [1]

['Ellsworth Toohey']

Date: 2026-03-13  

Apple's cheapest laptop — the new $700 MacBook Neo — just beat a cloud server with four times more memory and ten more processor cores at crunching 100 million rows of data. The Neo runs on the same chip as the iPhone 16 Pro, ships with a modest 8 GB of memory, and if you buy it in Europe, doesn't even come with a charging brick.

The team behind DuckDB, a free database tool popular with data analysts, bought one from the Apple Store and pitted it against a rented Amazon cloud machine that would cost about $490 a month. They threw 43 different data-crunching tasks at both, as Gábor Szárnyas writes on the DuckDB blog. On a cold start — the first time each query runs, before anything is cached — the laptop finished every task in under a minute. The cloud server took nearly two and a half minutes. On repeated runs, when both machines had warmed up, the laptop was only 13% slower despite its fraction of the hardware.

They kept pushing. A larger dataset with 99 complex queries finished in about 15 minutes. Triple the data size and it still completed everything in 79 minutes, though one particularly nasty query chewed up 51 of those minutes by itself and forced the laptop to use 80 GB of its hard drive as overflow space. That's where the budget shows — the Neo's storage is two to four times slower than Apple's pricier laptops.

The same DuckDB team had previously tested this exact chip while it was still inside an iPhone 16 Pro, packed in a box of dry ice to keep it cool. A phone chip that can crunch corporate-scale data is now in the cheapest Mac you can buy.

Previously:

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[1] Url: https://boingboing.net/2026/03/13/apples-cheapest-laptop-beat-a-cloud-server-with-4x-the-memory.html

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