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Big data on the cheapest MacBook

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Re: Big data on the cheapest MacBook

#201

Post by butILoveLife »

mikey_p wrote: post #191
butILoveLife wrote: post #145

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 Debian is outdated linux. It is literally designed to be 2 years outdated upon release.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.

But then you dont get Nvidia, 16gb, or 512 SSD.

And all you needed to do was know Fedora is SOTA. Once you know that, you don't need to change.

Re: Big data on the cheapest MacBook

#202

Post by mjlee »

vasco wrote: post #34
montroser wrote: post #26

This is as much an indictment of AWS compute as it is anything else.

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.

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).

Re: Big data on the cheapest MacBook

#203

Post by cipehr »

Robdel12 wrote: post #81
rob wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

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.

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

Re: Big data on the cheapest MacBook

#204

Post by allenu »

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 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.)

Re: Big data on the cheapest MacBook

#205

Post by dracyr »

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 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.

Re: Big data on the cheapest MacBook

#206

Post by tonymet »

“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.

Re: Big data on the cheapest MacBook

#207

Post by reaperducer »

ghaff wrote: post #158
rob wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

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.

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.

Re: Big data on the cheapest MacBook

#208

Post by Robdel12 »

gozzoo wrote: post #161
Robdel12 wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah! My M1 air is now my iOS build server since GH actions bill macOS mins at 10x the price.

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.

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

Re: Big data on the cheapest MacBook

#209

Post by Robdel12 »

bryanrasmussen wrote: post #69
Robdel12 wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah! My M1 air is now my iOS build server since GH actions bill macOS mins at 10x the price.

why does GH actions bill macOS minis 10X?

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-...

Re: Big data on the cheapest MacBook

#210

Post by g947o »

hrmtst93837 wrote: post #31
g947o wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

[flagged]

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.

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