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Posted by bcye 4 hours ago

Big Data on the Cheapest MacBook(duckdb.org)
193 points | 161 commentspage 2
onlyrealcuzzo 2 hours ago|
This is awesome.

I wish more companies would do showcases like this of what kind of load you can expect from commodity-ish hardware.

butILoveLife 2 hours ago|
[flagged]
f6v 2 hours ago|||
I never met someone using Apple laptops professionally who thought it was a status symbol. I only keep hearing this from non-Apple users.
antonyh 1 hour ago|||
The only status it brings is "smart enough to not use Windows 11" or "cares enough to get the work done rather than fighting with Linux on laptops".

(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)

butILoveLife 1 hour ago||||
Its because its frowned upon to say it out loud.

Think of the people who buy fancy cars and pretend they bought it for other reasons than status.

NetMageSCW 1 hour ago||
I did buy my car for reasons other than status. That’s just a bonus.
dartharva 1 hour ago|||
This brand's perception varies wildly between different income groups, but is still one or the other flavor of positive in the end.
throwawaytea 54 minutes ago||
I have blue collar friends in California that consider apple products a sign of leftism and I hate to say it, but even sexuality (but that moreso in a joking way.)
neom 1 hour ago|||
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html "Be kind. Don't be snarky. Converse curiously; don't cross-examine. Edit out swipes."
tasuki 2 hours ago||
That's not Big Data. If you "need to process Big Data on the move" - what you need is a network.
red-iron-pine 2 hours ago||
aye.

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.

butILoveLife 2 hours ago||
[flagged]
alex_creates 2 hours ago||
Funny just yesterday I almost bought one but got cold feet and opted for a low range MacBook with M5 chip. The Apple sales rep was not convinced it would be enough when i described using it for vibecoding and deploying so kind of talked me out of getting the Neo. I normally use a mix of LLMs, then connect to Github and do a one-click deploy on CreateOS. Do you think I over-reacted? The price of the Neo is SO attractive, a clean half price compared to what I got.
kingnothing 1 hour ago||
Why do you need an M5 to run Cursor and a browser? Your laptop isn't doing anything in your described workflow.
MBCook 53 minutes ago|||
I think you’ll be quite a bit happier. Between the quality of life stuff like the ancient life sensor, the pure quality stuff like a better screen and speakers, and extra RAM so it lasts longer that seems like a good decision.

The Neo is neat and for someone who mostly does surfing and standard office work kind of stuff I suspect it’s a pretty great little laptop for way less than Apple usually charges.

But it’s not going to compete with an M5 anything.

alpaca128 2 hours ago|||
Imho 8GB RAM for productivity can quickly be restrictive. I used an M1 with 8GB and my current Macbook is M2 with 16GB, and to me the difference feels bigger than 2x. It seems not everyone here feels that way, but I'd say there's a reason Apple bumped the base models to 16 and makes that exclusive to non-Neo models.
NetMageSCW 1 hour ago||
If you have doubts and you have the money, why worry about it?
nicoritschel 3 hours ago||
> compared to 3–5 GB/s

Their numbers are a bit outdated. M5 Macbook pro SSDs are literally 5x this speed. It's wild.

jsheard 3 hours ago||
I'm seeing ~6GB/sec: https://www.tomshardware.com/laptops/macbooks/m5-macbook-pro...

That's decently fast but not especially remarkable, most Gen4 NVMe drives can hit 6-7GB/sec.

lowkj 2 hours ago||
To be clear, that article is about the base m5, not the m5 pro or m5 max.

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..."

jsheard 2 hours ago||
OP did just say M5 (implying the base model)

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 hot and power hungry for laptops, so I think Apple's custom controller is actually the first to practically hit those speeds on mobile.

hu3 3 hours ago||
Interesting. Do you have a link?
tosh 3 hours ago||
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?

zipping1549 3 hours ago||
> TL;DR: How does the latest entry-level MacBook perform on database workloads? We benchmarked it to find out.

That's not tldr, that's just subheader.

coreyhn 2 hours ago||
Thank you! I was going to say the same thing. It doesn’t give mr an overview at all
szarnyasg 1 hour ago||
You're right! I pushed an updated TL;DR block.
pella 1 hour ago||
other test:

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...

aaronharnly 2 hours ago||
That c8g.metal-48xl instance costs $7.63008 on demand[1], so for the price of the laptop, you could run queries on it for about ~90 hours.

:shrug: as to whether that makes the laptop or the giant instance the better place to do one's work…

[1] https://aws.amazon.com/ec2/pricing/on-demand/

varispeed 3 hours ago||
If you can fit it on a thumb drive, it's not Big Data.
butILoveLife 2 hours ago|
[flagged]
fnord77 2 hours ago|
this has a phone CPU/memory
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