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Big data on the cheapest MacBook

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Re: Big data on the cheapest MacBook

#291

Post by compounding_it »

noisy_boy wrote: post #276
skeeter2020 wrote: post #271

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This doesn't really sound like a vacation.

Seems like vacation from things you have to do to things you enjoy doing.

According to Google AI > A vacation (American English) or holiday (British English) is a designated period of time for rest, recreation, or travel, often taken away from home. It involves a break from work or school routines, usually lasting several days or weeks. Vacations are crucial for mental health, reducing stress, and fostering better relationships.

So maybe different meaning for everyone. For me it’s getting away from technology and into nature.

Re: Big data on the cheapest MacBook

#292

Post by coldtea »

joe_mamba wrote: post #157
NetMageSCW wrote: post #147

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sometimes the truth is succinct.

If someone would call Apple customers idiots, would they get banned for breaking HN rules? After all, they were the ones who kept buying generations of overpriced overheating intel garbage with keyboard that would break from spec of dust. Would that not also be the truth? Then why is it OK to call other people, Mac Neo skeptics in this case, idiots?

>If someone would call Apple customers idiots, would they get banned for breaking HN rules?

No. There's no shortage of comments of HN that do exactly that.

In fact, you just imply exactly that regarding them buying "overpriced overheating intel garbage with keyboard that would break from spec of dust".

Been using Wintel and Mac laptops for 30 years, and, crap keyboard aside (itself an overblown concern, had those for 5 years and never got it stuck) my Intel MBPs were still great laptops, and nothing in the Wintel world was as good except some Lenovo machines (which were good in ways the Mac laptops weren't but also the opposite).

>Then why is it OK to call other people, Mac Neo skeptics in this case, idiots?

For the same reason the previous case is.

Re: Big data on the cheapest MacBook

#293

Post by beagle3 »

__mharrison__ wrote: post #181
ladberg wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

20 year old BI app. Columnar DBs weren't really a thing. (MonetDB was brand new but not super stable. I committed the SQLAlchemy interface to it.)

KDB v1 is from sometime in the late 1990’s (I met v2 in 2002; but v1 was internal use only at some investment bank).

But that follows A and A+ which were extremely column oriented and date to early 1990s or even late 1980s ; and to various APL implementations going back to the 1960’s

Columnar DBs were very much a thing among APL users (finance and operations research) but weren’t really known outside those fields - and even in those fields, there was a period of amnesia in the late ‘90s/early 2000’s

Re: Big data on the cheapest MacBook

#294

Post by winrid »

prmph wrote: post #94
ajross wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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. But... you can do the same exercise with a $350 windows thing. Everyone knows you can do "real dev work" on it, because "real dev work" isn't a performance case anymore, hasn't been for like a decade now, and anyone who says otherwise is just a snob wanting an excuse to expense a $4k designer fash…

No, you can't do real work on a $350 windows machine. No way such a setup is suitable for anything beyond browsing a tab or two and connecting to servers using SSH. And, the whole shittiness of the experience will even distract you attempting real work: the horrible touchpad, the bad screen, the forced windows updates when you trying to start the machine to do something urgent, ads in Windows, the lack of proper prog…

The ThinkBook 14 Gen 6 at Costco for $380 has a single thread passmark score of 2800. The laptop I use to develop most of my SaaS products, with IDEs and claude open etc, has a score of 2000. I run Linux, but win10 iot runs fine on it too.

Re: Big data on the cheapest MacBook

#295

Post by ngai_aku »

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.

Linux? Outdated version of macOS?

Re: Big data on the cheapest MacBook

#297

Post by whatever1 »

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…

This is PR speak.

No 8GB, compressed or whatever was not enough for MacOS when M1 was released. Even for simple outlook, web browser, excel type of workflows.

After 3-4 hours of work, the window manager process itself is consuming gigabytes of memory. Not even considering any browser or electron apps.

My M1 Mac mini was choking up so much that I had to trade it in. That was back in 2021. Today apps are even more bloated.

Re: Big data on the cheapest MacBook

#298

Post by trueno »

tjoff wrote: post #64
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 will do real work fine. But slack and a browser will bring it to its knees.

yea that's just not true lol.

Re: Big data on the cheapest MacBook

#299

Post by achairapart »

embedding-shape wrote: post #138
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 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…

I do most of my work remotely on a little Raspberry Pi 4 server attached to my home ISP: https://fatcity.it/

But I'm planning to do a big jump: Soon I will switch to a 2012 Mac Mini as my primary linux server!

Re: Big data on the cheapest MacBook

#300

Post by szarnyasg »

ody4242 wrote: post #28

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

That's a good point. I re-ran the benchmark on two instances:

- c8gd.4xlarge - this has a single 950 GB NVMe SSD.

- c5ad.4xlarge - this has 2 x 300 GB disks, which I put in a RAID 0 array. There are no c6ad.4xlarge instances, so this is the closes NVMe-enabled approximate to ClickBench's most popular choice, c6a.4xlarge.

I also added results from my local dev machine, a MacBook M1 Max with 64 GB RAM and 10 cores.

Here are the results:

  | machine        | cold_run_avg | cold_run_sum | hot_run_avg | hot_run_sum |
  | -------------- | -----------: | -----------: | ----------: | ----------: |
  | macbook m1 max |         0.48 |        20.68 |        0.43 |       18.60 |
  | macbook neo    |         1.39 |        59.73 |        1.26 |       54.27 |
  | c8gd.4xlarge   |         0.51 |        22.04 |        0.24 |       10.36 |
  | c5ad.4xlarge   |         1.29 |        54.14 |        0.55 |       22.91 |
  | c6a.4xlarge    |         3.37 |       145.08 |        1.11 |       47.86 |
  | c8g.metal-48xl |         3.95 |       169.67 |        0.10 |        4.35 |
On the cold run, the MacBook is on par with the c5ad.4xlarge. The c8gd.4xlarge is about ~2.5x faster on the cold run.

I know this is moving the goalpost, however, it's quite interesting that both of these cloud instances with instance-attached storage are still outperformed by the M1 Max (which is 4+ years old) on the cold run. And they would quite likely lose against the latest MacBook Pro with the M5 Pro/Max on both the cold and the hot runs. But that's an experiment for another day.

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