Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Big data on the cheapest MacBook

duckdb.org

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

251–260 of 321 posts

Re: Big data on the cheapest MacBook

#251

Post by szarnyasg »

tosh wrote: post #36

For the TPC-DS results it would also have been nice to show how the macbook neo compares to the AWS instances. Or am I missing something?

Indeed, it would have been interesting but I really wanted to get the blog post out on the launch day of the MacBook Neo and did not have the bandwidth to run additional cloud experiments.

I ran TPC-DS SF300 now on the c6a.4xlarge. It turns out that it's still quite limited by the EBS disk's IO: while 32 GB memory is much more than 8 GB, DuckDB needs to spill to disk a lot and this shows on the runtimes. Running all 99 queries took 37 minutes, so about half of the MacBook's 79 minutes.

> Command being timed: "duckdb tpcds-sf300.db -f bench.sql"

> Percent of CPU this job got: 250%

> Elapsed (wall clock) time (h:mm:ss or m:ss): 37:00.96

> Maximum resident set size (kbytes): 25559652

Re: Big data on the cheapest MacBook

#252

Post by pauljonas »

rob wrote: post #62
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.

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…

Still using that 2019 MBP (16 inch, 16G memory) as a daily work machine.

Is still handling the load well, though at times, fans get quite loud, especially with all the background processes and VM setups.

Hope to get a new MBP this year, as being on Intel means lots of software that won't run on it (ie, Codex app for example, won't run on Intel Macs)

Re: Big data on the cheapest MacBook

#254

Post by refulgentis »

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.

> just to show people it’s not this handicapped little machine

I used to think this way about Apple and its jarring to read with it 10-15 years behind me.

It reads as aggro and oddly tribalistic / sports fan-y.

(what people? who thinks its slower than an M1? who thinks you can't code on it? what will you coding on it prove to these people that the benchmarks they read can't? with all that, why get so invested you're buying a machine you don't want to use day to day? what does "handicapped" mean in this context?)

Only sharing b/c I never understood why people would roll their eyes at me, and apparently I finally reached my own graybeard moment, and I am now rolling my eyes at both of my selves :)

Re: Big data on the cheapest MacBook

#255

Post by crowcroft »

__mharrison__ wrote: post #73

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.

A bit of a moving target there, especially with the definition of medium data on disk considering the rise of high speed NVMe vs spinning metal. Makes me wonder if the 00s 'Big Data' era and the resulting infra is largely just outdated now...

Re: Big data on the cheapest MacBook

#256

Post by qingcharles »

reaperducer wrote: post #207
ghaff wrote: post #158

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I have one of these (it's my only Mac), but it only has 2GB of RAM, so it's kinda rough. I tried Mint on it, but IIRC it might not have the GPU drivers? I just bought it a new SSD which helped a bit.

Re: Big data on the cheapest MacBook

#257

Post by windowsrookie »

hermanzegerman wrote: post #240
havaloc wrote: post #139

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's not what the video insinuates.

Yes you're right. I meaned a different video, but I can't find it right now. I've looked it up, and back then MacOS had a bug which exacerbated that issue. Here is an article https://www.macrumors.com/2021/02/23/m1-mac-users-report-exc...

You originally stated "Also there are countless reports of bricked M1 8GB MacBook Airs that are bricked because the SSD used up it's write cycles"

Do you have a source for these "countless bricked SSD's"?

Post reply on HN