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Big data on the cheapest MacBook
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Re: Big data on the cheapest MacBook
#72Seems completely unnecessary, there is probably 0 overlap between people who buy a cheap MacBook and people running DuckDB locally
I love small form factors, and I am what youd call a professionel :P
I think the form factor is basically the same (maybe slightly thicker) as a Macbook Air. It's basically an Air with lower performance in most dimensions.
Re: Big data on the cheapest MacBook
#73When 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.
Re: Big data on the cheapest MacBook
#74I’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.
Only if you insist on running the standalone slack app for some reason. Why run one instance of Chrome when you can pay for two?
Re: Big data on the cheapest MacBook
#75I’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 fine to if you don’t have any memory hogging apps. But as soon as you fire up a couple demanding Docker containers you’ll feel the pain. 8GB isn’t so much RAM for some applications.
Re: Big data on the cheapest MacBook
#76Earlier quoted context omitted.
I agree and disagree, the benefit with cloud is you "don't need to manage it", it scales automatically, redundancy, and automatic backups etc. I do think you are right; in the future there will be more infrastructure as code as cost pressures become more obvious.
Those benefits are at least partly lies though. The tooling — K8S with all its YAML, Terraform, Docker, cloud CLI tools, etc. — is pretty hideously ugly and complicated. I watch people struggle to beat it into shape just like they did with sysadmin automation tools like Puppet and Chef a decade or more ago. We have not removed complexity, only moved it. The auto scaling thing is a half truth. It can do this if you de…
Not all IaC is Kubernetes.
Re: Big data on the cheapest MacBook
#77That's an awesome idea to get a bricked MacBook Neo really fast because those idiots soldered the SSD inside
Apple has been soldering the SSD into MacBooks for over 10 years now, and most 10 year old MacBooks still have a working SSD.
Not if you're powerusing it like in the Article and relying heavily on Swap.
Also there are countless reports of bricked M1 8GB MacBook Airs that are bricked because the SSD used up it's write cycles
Re: Big data on the cheapest MacBook
#78Seems completely unnecessary, there is probably 0 overlap between people who buy a cheap MacBook and people running DuckDB locally
I've used MacBook Airs as primary dev machines multiple times in my career (before Apple silicon, when Airs had truly shit performance).
There is always a trade-off of cost/convenience/power, and some folks are going to end up the the Neo end of the spectrum.
Re: Big data on the cheapest MacBook
#79Re: Big data on the cheapest MacBook
#80I’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.
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, but the threshold for that is a lot higher than HN comments seem to think.