Big data on the cheapest MacBook

Post by skeeter2020 » Fri, Mar 13, 2026, 12:36 AM UTC

dracyr wrote: post #205

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 tho…

Post by joshmn » Fri, Mar 13, 2026, 1:43 AM UTC

_fzslm wrote: post #272

embedding-shape wrote: post #138

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

My substantially more privileged, but somewhat equivalent experience, was doing mobile app development, Docker, linux VMs, UI design, and finding out about hacker news on an 11 inch MacBook Air with 4gb of RAM. i have a computer that benchmarks literally 10x faster and with 32x the amount of RAM, but i miss that little thing that helped me build my career from nothing

Post by jtbaker » Fri, Mar 13, 2026, 2:05 AM UTC

g947o wrote: post #25

opentokix wrote: post #18

Mind blown, if you need to handle "big" data on the move - the macbook neo is not the right choice. - Who would have guessed that outcome?

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.

Post by noisy_boy » Fri, Mar 13, 2026, 2:19 AM UTC

jorvi wrote: post #229

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.

People usually forget 8GB isn't 8GB. Memory compression means you can store ~2x (lz4) to 3x (zstd) as much data in memory as ordinarily. And in the worst case, reading swap from disk (writes don't matter as they can be predicted) is so much faster with NVMe SSDs. The worst corner they cut is no keyboard backlighting. That saves them what, $1 BoM per MacBook Neo? Especially because now they have to put up an entire ne…

Post by winrid » Fri, Mar 13, 2026, 3:04 AM UTC

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.