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Big data on the cheapest MacBook

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Re: Big data on the cheapest MacBook

#131

Post by kingnothing »

butILoveLife wrote: post #105

[flagged]

Maybe it's an excellent experience these days, but every time I've tried Linux on desktop over the past 25 years I get burned. Maybe it works for a while, then your NIC driver gets borked and you spend 2 days trying to get it working again. Or some update goes sideways and you lose the GUI, launching only into a terminal. It's always something. And laptops have even less common hardware than desktops.

On the other hand, every Mac I've used over the past 15 years has been bulletproof. It turns on, it works, it runs *nix. It's an invisible interface to getting work done.

Re: Big data on the cheapest MacBook

#133

Post by cosmic_cheese »

hermanzegerman wrote: post #123
cosmic_cheese wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> And I have a hard time believing people who tell me stories about low power consumption, because no one had cared about that until Apple pretended people cared about it. That’s because battery life was pretty mediocre across the board, with Apple occasionally squeaking out a bit of an upper hand on the Air. Most laptops were in the same boat, aside from gaming and workstation laptops but battery life has never been…

To be honest I never had Issues with Battery Life on my ThinkPad. I've gotten out 10-12 hours with the 96Wh Battery and never felt the need for much more. I think most people who are so wowed by Macs bought just a garbage Windows Machine (e.g. almost everything from Asus and Acer) before and then splurged the money for a nice one, so obviously it's so much better in comparison.

Is that under Windows or Linux? It’s not awful, but depending on usage a MacBook can do 16h+ with the same size battery, especially if put into low power mode, which is substantially better.

The smaller 13” Air also gets similar numbers despite its smaller battery, which is a big deal for people who don’t want to lug around a 15/16” laptop.

Re: Big data on the cheapest MacBook

#134

Post by [deleted] »

eru wrote: post #112
anthonySs wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Does Claude Code take up that many local resources? I thought the heavy lifting was in the cloud?

[deleted]

Re: Big data on the cheapest MacBook

#135

Post by asow92 »

Robdel12 wrote: post #37

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.

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.

Re: Big data on the cheapest MacBook

#136

Post by ajross »

prmph wrote: post #94
ajross wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 fash…

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 prog…

> 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...

Re: Big data on the cheapest MacBook

#137

Post by joe_mamba »

coldtea wrote: post #125
Robdel12 wrote: post #37

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.

[flagged]

delete pls

Re: Big data on the cheapest MacBook

#138

Post by embedding-shape »

Robdel12 wrote: post #37

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.

> 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.

Re: Big data on the cheapest MacBook

#139

Post by havaloc »

hermanzegerman wrote: post #77
windowsrookie wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Apple has been soldering the SSD into MacBooks for over 10 years now, and most 10 year old MacBooks still have a working SSD.

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

That's not what the video insinuates.
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