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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 attracti…
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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.
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Seems completely unnecessary, there is probably 0 overlap between people who buy a cheap MacBook and people running DuckDB locally
With I/O streaming and efficient transformation I do big data on my consumer PC and good old cheap HDDs just fine.
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> 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…
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?
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.
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.
How did you get one already? I thought they were just up for pre-order
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.
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!
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.
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That laptop won't have half the battery life the macbook does. It really all only boils down to the "handiness" of the device.
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.
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
Claude suggested to just use DuckDB instead and indeed, it made short work of it.