Big Data on the Cheapest MacBook
Summary
DuckDB researchers benchmark the entry-level MacBook Neo for analytics workloads, using ClickBench and TPC-DS to compare against cloud instances. The results show that the MacBook can handle many workloads thanks to local NVMe and out-of-core processing, but memory and I/O limits mean cloud boxes outperform in some scenarios, though the MacBook remains surprisingly capable for on-device data exploration. The article provides practical takeaways for teams evaluating on-device analytics versus cloud deployments.