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Big data on the cheapest MacBook

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Re: Big data on the cheapest MacBook

#191

Post by mikey_p »

butILoveLife wrote: post #145
kingnothing wrote: post #131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 ha…

I'd be willing to gamble that you used Debian-family. Debian is outdated linux. It is literally designed to be 2 years outdated upon release. Use Fedora. Its up to date. Note that Fedora is NOT Arch.

That's kinda the point of the Mac though, you don't have to get the right distribution or deal with pedantry, you buy, take it home, open it and will run for 8-10 hours of work without charging. No distro issues.

Re: Big data on the cheapest MacBook

#192

Post by tjoff »

Aurornis wrote: post #80
tjoff wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It will do real work fine. But slack and a browser will bring it to its knees.

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,…

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.

Re: Big data on the cheapest MacBook

#193

Post by ge96 »

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.

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

Re: Big data on the cheapest MacBook

#194

Post by amluto »

devnotes77 wrote: post #97

[flagged]

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.

Re: Big data on the cheapest MacBook

#195

Post by throwawaytea »

dartharva wrote: post #182
f6v wrote: post #127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I never met someone using Apple laptops professionally who thought it was a status symbol. I only keep hearing this from non-Apple users.

This brand's perception varies wildly between different income groups, but is still one or the other flavor of positive in the end.

I have blue collar friends in California that consider apple products a sign of leftism and I hate to say it, but even sexuality (but that moreso in a joking way.)

Re: Big data on the cheapest MacBook

#196

Post by MBCook »

alex_creates wrote: post #89

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…

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.

Re: Big data on the cheapest MacBook

#197

Post by amluto »

namibj wrote: post #45
ody4242 wrote: post #28

I would have benchmarked with an instance that has local nvme, like c8gd.4xlarge.

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 sto…

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 :)

Re: Big data on the cheapest MacBook

#198

Post by MBCook »

hermanzegerman wrote: post #108
sam345 wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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.

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.

Re: Big data on the cheapest MacBook

#199

Post by tonymet »

hirako2000 wrote: post #174

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.

IO on a raspi is pathetic. As packaged it’s 100 times slower , with a M.2 hat it’s still 5x slower

Re: Big data on the cheapest MacBook

#200

Post by MBCook »

ramgale wrote: post #41

Seems completely unnecessary, there is probably 0 overlap between people who buy a cheap MacBook and people running DuckDB locally

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.

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