Also there are countless reports of bricked M1 8GB MacBook Airs that are bricked because the SSD used up it's write cycles
If Apple would build their laptops serviceable like ThinkPads I would buy one today.
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.
It’s staggering. Jaw dropping. Bandwidth is even worse, like 10000X markup.
Yet cloud is how we do things. There’s a generation or maybe two now of developers who know nothing but cloud SaaS.
I watched everyone fall for it in real time.
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 deploy correctly but the zero downtime promise is only true maybe half the time. It also does this at greatly inflated cost.
Today you can scale with bare metal. Nobody except huge companies physically racks anymore. Companies like Hetzner and DataPacket have APIs to bring boxes up. There’s a delay, but you solve that by a bit of over provisioning. Very very few companies have work loads that are so bursty and irregular that they need full limitless up and down scaling. That’s one of those niche problems everyone thinks they have.
The uptime promise is false in my experience. Cloud goes down for cluster upgrades and any myriad other reasons just as often as self managed stuff. I’ve seen serious unplanned outages with cloud too. I don’t have hard numbers but I would definitely wager that if cloud is better for uptime at all it’s not enough of an improvement to justify that gigantic markup.
For what cloud charges I should, as the deploying user, receive five nines without having to think about it ever. It does not deliver that, and it makes me think about it a lot with all the complexity.
The only technical promise it makes good on, and it does do this well, is not losing data. They’ve clearly put more thought into that than any other aspect of the internal architecture. But there’s other ways to not lose data that don’t require you to pay a 10X markup on compute and a 10000X markup on transfer.
I think the real selling point of cloud is blame.
When cloud goes down, it’s not your fault. You can blame the cloud provider.
IT people like it, and it’s usually not their money anyway. Companies like it. They’re paying through the nose for the ability to tell the customer that the outage is Amazon’s fault.
Cloud took over during the ZIRP era anyway when money was infinite. If you have growth raise more. COGS doesn’t matter.
Maybe cloud is ZIRPslop.
If your application won't ever require more resources than a single server or two, then you are better off looking at other alternatives.
> Here's the thing: if you are running Big Data workloads on your laptop every day, you probably shouldn't get the MacBook Neo.
> All that said, if you run DuckDB in the cloud and primarily use your laptop as a client, this is a great device
That's not tldr, that's just subheader.
Or am I missing something?
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 am jealous of my wife’s 13” M5 iPad Pro though, that oled screen is gorgeous, a wonder of modern engineering.
Well, the MacBook Air was also a lot more expensive than the Steam Deck?
(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 they're going to stop supporting the Intel stuff this year and no more software updates. It'll probably be obsolete in six months with the rate things are going, but I've been averaging seven years between upgrades so it should be good!
So, the m5 with 48gb of ram will be amazing.
Obviously the LLM inference is super heavy, but the actual work / task at hand is being executed on the device.
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.
Can we please just move on? Maybe get your hardware checked if you’re legitimately still having these issues.
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 fashion accessory.
IMHO the important questions to answer are business side: will this displace sales of $350 windows machines or not, and (critically) will it displace sales of $1.3k Airs?
HN always wants to talk about the technical stuff, but the technical stuff here isn't really interesting. The MacBook Neo is indeed the best laptop you can get for $6-700.
But that's a weird price point in the market right now, as it underperforms the $1k "business laptops" (to avoid cannibalizing Air sales) and sits well above the "value laptop" price range.
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 programmability of Windows (unless you use WSL).... Add the fact that the toy is likely to break in a year or two. These issue exist on far more expensive Windows machines, how much more a $350 machine.
Leaving Windows machines and OS behind for more than a decade has been a continuing breath of fresh air. I have several issues with the Apple devices and macOS (as I have with Linux too), but on the whole they are far better than Windows. The only good thing about Windows that I miss on Macs is the file explorer and window management, not sure why Apple stubbornly refuses to copy those.
If Windows/Linux/x86 is non-negotiable and that’s your budget, I would never in a million years recommend anything brand new. This is when you go pick up a $350 used midrange ThinkPad on eBay. It won’t outperform a Neo in terms of CPU and battery life but I guarantee it’ll be a better experience than the garbage routinely sold at this price point.
Sigh. I mean, even absent the obvious answers[1], that's just wrong anyway. You're being a snob. Want to run WSL? Run WSL. Want to run vscode natively? Ditto. Put it on a cheap TV and run your graphical layout and 3D modelling work. I mean, obviously it does all that stuff. OBVIOUSLY, because that stuff is all cheap and easy.
All the complaining you're doing is about preference, not capability. You're being a snob. Which is hardly weird, we're all snobs about something.
But snobs aren't going to buy the Neo either. Again, the business question here is whether the $350 junk users can be convinced to be snobs for $600.
[1] "Put Linux on it", "All of your stuff is in the cloud anyway", "It's still a thousand times faster than the machine on which I did my best work", etc...
i just got an m5 max with 128gb of ram specifically to run local llms
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.com/1NRIZrg.jpeg
This was the computer I was developing PHP backends on + jQuery frontends, and where I published a bunch of projects that eventually led to me getting my first software development job, in a startup, and discovering HN pretty much my first day on the job :)
The actual hardware you use seems to me like it matters the least, when it comes to actually being able to do things.
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.
My good old LG Gram (from 2017? 2015? don't even remember) already had 24 GB of RAM. That was 10 years ago.
A decade later I cannot see myself being a laptop with 1/3rd the mem.
If it didn't, Apple has other laptops today with more RAM.
That couldn't be more accurate
;)
Their numbers are a bit outdated. M5 Macbook pro SSDs are literally 5x this speed. It's wild.
That's decently fast but not especially remarkable, most Gen4 NVMe drives can hit 6-7GB/sec.
https://www.apple.com/newsroom/2026/03/apple-introduces-macb...
"The new MacBook Pro delivers up to 2x faster read/write performance compared to the previous generation reaching speeds of up to 14.5GB/s..."
Those speeds on the Pro/Max are impressive though, more in line with Gen5 NVMe drives. Those have been available in desktops for some time but AFAIK the controllers are still much too power hungry for laptops, so I think Apple's custom controller is actually the first to practically hit those speeds on mobile.
I wish more companies would do showcases like this of what kind of load you can expect from commodity-ish hardware.
Think of the people who buy fancy cars and pretend they bought it for other reasons than status.
(I use Linux on desktop as a first choice, but it's always been an uphill struggle with laptop wifi/power manglement/audio for me. I blame the esoteric chipsets used in the machines I've bought in the UK)
the laptop is gonna have some local code, maybe a lot, but if I'm doing legitimate "big data" that data is living i the cloud somewhere, and the laptop is just my interface.
Look at how they tricked people into thinking their CPU could run LLMs and how they sold integrated GPUs as something special with Unified Memory.
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.
:shrug: as to whether that makes the laptop or the giant instance the better place to do one's work…
Did a PoC on a AWS Lambda for data that was GZ'ed in a s3 bucket.
It was able to replace about 400 C# LoC with about 10 lines.
Amazing little bit of kit.
No.
>Do I reject a world where all of the above is necessary to realize value from an entry-level MacBook?
In theory, yes.
I totally understand if you need to compile for iphones. We need to make apps for the lower and middle class people that think a $40/mo cellphone is a status symbol. I get it.
But if you are not... why? I hate windows, but we have Fedora... and you get an Nvidia. Is it just a status symbol? And I have a hard time believing people who tell me stories about low power consumption, because no one had cared about that until Apple pretended people cared about it.
I'm right now in the Market for a new Laptop, because I need way more GPU Power than my T470 provides, and to be honest the MacBookPros are quite competitively priced compared to the P-ThinkPads with Nvidia Cards. (Both around 3000€) They also finally offer a matte screen option
The only thing holding me back right now is the soldered SSD, RAM (and shitty Linux support).
It was quite nice being able to upgrade RAM, SSD and replace the Battery on it. Otherwise it wouldn't have lasted for 9 years
That’s because battery life was pretty mediocre across the board, with Apple occasionally squeaking out a bit of an upper hand on the Air. Most laptops were in the same boat, aside from gaming and workstation laptops but battery life has never been the point of those.
That changed dramatically with the M-series Macs. People didn’t start caring because Apple did, but because it meant no longer being tethered to a wall, being able to do a lot of outings without a brick or charger cable at all, and on extended trips being able to get by with a little phone charger instead of a the usual huge ungainly brick.
One of the primary objectives of a laptop is portability, and long battery life is an objective upgrade in that category. Not everybody needs it but for those who do it’s difficult to give up once you’ve had it.
I think most people who are so wowed by Macs bought just a garbage Windows Machine (e.g. almost everything from Asus and Acer) before and then splurged the money for a nice one, so obviously it's so much better in comparison.
The smaller 13” Air also gets similar numbers despite its smaller battery, which is a big deal for people who don’t want to lug around a 15/16” laptop.
And MacBooks also have a better display and build quality. Like, touchpad is still hit or miss on any non-Apple device.
On the other hand, every Mac I've used over the past 15 years has been bulletproof. It turns on, it works, it runs *nix. It's an invisible interface to getting work done.
Use Fedora. Its up to date.
Note that Fedora is NOT Arch.
I’m not surprised that the people in your social circles don’t care about being able to use a portable computer outside of their bedrooms. I assure you that in the real world battery life is front of mind for a great many people.
I’d also suggest not leaning so heavily on “but you get Nvidia!” when the crux of your gripe seems to be about brand hype. You are chasing a brand. You clearly do not know the first thing about the GPU/AI capabilities of the computers that you seem to hate so much.
I haven't packed a charger for the day for 3 years. I can work in coffee shops or on the couch for over 6 hours without even thinking about charging. I'm sorry but if you haven't tried the M* macbooks you don't know what you're criticising.
2025-09-08 : "Big Data on the Move: DuckDB on the Framework Laptop 13"
"TL;DR: We put DuckDB through its paces on a 12-core ultrabook with 128 GB RAM, running TPC-H queries up to SF10,000."
https://duckdb.org/2025/09/08/duckdb-on-the-framework-laptop...
TutleCpt•2h ago
michalc•2h ago
I guess they’re using a different definition?
bcye•2h ago
rattray•2h ago
very much so…
jawns•2h ago
rrr_oh_man•2h ago
speedgoose•2h ago
speedgoose•2h ago
You have phones that are faster than cloud VMs of the past. You can use bare metal servers with up to 344 cores and 16TB of ram.
I used to share your definition too, but I now say that if it doesn’t open in Microsoft Excel, it’s big data.
Zambyte•2h ago
As you say, single machines can scale up incredibly far. That just means 16 TB datasets no longer demand big data solutions.
speedgoose•1h ago
Many people like to think they have big data, and you kinda have to agree with them if you want their money. At least in consulting.
Also you could go well beyond a 16TB dataset on a single machine. You assume that the whole uncompressed dataset has to fit in memory, but many workloads don’t need that.
How many people in the world have such big datasets to analyse within reasonable time?
Some people say extreme data.
brudgers•1h ago
Google has big data. You are not google.