News for hackers. Stuff that matters.
Re:Big Data on the Cheapest MacBook by ramgale on Thursday March 12, 2026 @09:03AM (#47350002)
Seems completely unnecessary, there is probably 0 overlap between people who buy a cheap MacBook and people running DuckDB locally
Re:Big Data on the Cheapest MacBook by MBCook on Thursday March 12, 2026 @11:41AM (#47352432)
I agree I don’t think it’s going to be something people really do.

I just thought it was neat. It’s a phone chip, we’ve never been able to do stuff like this on an Apple phone chip before. No one was porting this to the iPhone to run there.

In my mind this is purely a curiosity article, and I like that.

Re:Big Data on the Cheapest MacBook by swiftcoder on Thursday March 12, 2026 @09:42AM (#47350432)
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 by ExxKA on Thursday March 12, 2026 @09:04AM (#47350013)
I love small form factors, and I am what youd call a professionel :P
Re:Big Data on the Cheapest MacBook by leoedin on Thursday March 12, 2026 @09:36AM (#47350362)
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 by dartharva on Thursday March 12, 2026 @11:25AM (#47352119)
You'd be surprised. There are many of us analysts in the third world who are paid pennies and expected to build large-scale exec dashboards from nontrivial data - with no cloud support whatsoever. ETL has to be local from hundreds of GBs of csv dumps.
Re:Big Data on the Cheapest MacBook by NetMageSCW on Thursday March 12, 2026 @11:03AM (#47351648)
It’s necessary because the ignorant keep saying 8GB of RAM is a deal breaking limitation on the cheapest MacBook available.