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I’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 thro
by Robdel12 7mo ago
I’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.
- raegis 7mo agoCan you say a little more about what you mean by "better"? How much faster is editing?
- swiftcoder 7mo agoBetter in terms of raw specs. The original M1 Air also came with 8GB of RAM, and the A18 Pro in the Neo is faster than the version of the M1 that shipped in the base model Air
- ramgine 7mo agoI just retired my m1 air to being a server this month. They’re very capable laptops. If the neo is even comparable in spec it’s excellent for the price
- mettamage 7mo agoI just bought a second hand M1 64GB as my main work laptop, haha. They definitely are capable laptops
- Robdel12 7mo agoYeah! My M1 air is now my iOS build server since GH actions bill macOS mins at 10x the price.
- bryanrasmussen 7mo agowhy does GH actions bill macOS minis 10X?
- jzebedee 7mo agoMins here being short for minutes, not minis.
- mikepurvis 7mo agoAnd, presumably for a combination of the Mac build (and hardware) being of niche interest and sitting outside the standard Linux workflows so it's annoying to administer. And serving a money-making audience (iOS app devs) who have a revenue stream and see the extra CI cost as worth it.
- UqWBcuFx6NV4r 7mo agoWhat is a macOS mini…
- NetMageSCW 7mo agoNot “mini”, “mins” -> minutes.
- Robdel12 7mo agoAh sorry minutes, they bill the most for macOS probably because of what a pain it is to scale it with apples EULA (I'm guessing) https://docs.github.com/en/billing/reference/actions-runner-pricing https://docs.github.com/en/billing/reference/actions-runner-...
- bryanrasmussen 7mo agoah ok, minutes makes more sense. thanks.
- gozzoo 7mo agoHow do you use M1 Air as iOS build server. Is 8G sufficient for only doing iOS builds? Do you connect to it remotely? Couls you please describe your dev process.
- Robdel12 7mo agoIt works out pretty okay for me, I do it since GH runners are very expensive and I have my own hardware so why not. https://docs.github.com/en/actions/concepts/runners/self-hosted-runners https://docs.github.com/en/actions/concepts/runners/self-hos... I setup a self hosted runner and then use that in my CI workflows. Then I disabled it from sleeping so it can clamshell forever and now it sits here in my living room silently workin' https://imgur.com/a/EaBICdo https://imgur.com/a/EaBICdo
- wincy 7mo agoMy m1 air with 1TB ssd and 16GB of ram is a little champion, I use it during travel to play indie games like Hades II or Slay the Spire, and it works really well, better than my Steam Deck which broke. The only issue it really has is when I try to plug it into my docking station it struggles mightily with 2 2K screens and a 4K screen, so I just use my desktop in that case. I am jealous of my wife’s 13” M5 iPad Pro though, that oled screen is gorgeous, a wonder of modern engineering.
- rob 7mo agoIt's starting to show its age, but I've been using a 2019 MacBook Pro with the Intel chip and 16GB of memory. Still handles multiple terminal sessions with Claude Code and Codex simultaneously, building in Xcode, running Docker in the background, etc. (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!
- Robdel12 7mo agoOh my. All I have to say is cherish the first week of your M* experience. :D When I got rid of my intel MBP (it was an i7) for my MBA it was astonishing how fast and smooth it was. So, the m5 with 48gb of ram will be amazing.
- cipehr 7mo agoI agree. It was utterly ridiculous how noticeable the improvement was. I was doing z3 solving for ICFP contest the first couple weeks after getting the m1 air. And it was consistently smoking my teammates maxed out i7 MBP
- swiftcoder 7mo agoHah. yeah. I went from a 64GB i9 to a 32GB M2, and it was night and fucking day
- eru 7mo agoWell, Claude Cod and Codex should be doing most of their heavy lifting in the cloud?
- amonith 7mo agoSort of, they have no "hands", LLMs can only respond that they want to execute a tool/command. So they do that a lot to: read files, search for things, compile projects, run tests, run other arbitrary commands, fetch stuff from the internet etc. Obviously the LLM inference is super heavy, but the actual work / task at hand is being executed on the device.
- tjoff 7mo agoIt will do real work fine. But slack and a browser will bring it to its knees.
- boutell 7mo agoOnly if you insist on running the standalone slack app for some reason. Why run one instance of Chrome when you can pay for two?
- mikepurvis 7mo agoI've been finding it hard to wean myself off the standalone app but another major reason to do so is opening threads in separate tabs. I find as soon as I'm involved in two or more conversations on there it's super easy to start losing track of things.
- Aurornis 7mo agoI 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.
- tjoff 7mo agoIt really isn't. It is a capable machine but modern software has made it a lemon. And that is the only reason apple sells it. So that whoever buys it needs to buy another one prematurely, generating another sale. Everything from apple to modern software is rotten to its core.
- mikestew 7mo agoIt really isn't. …in reply to someone who just said their experience is fine, and included details. If you just want to rant about Apple, have at it, but you’re going to have to do better than “nuh, uh” if you want to be convincing.
- MikeNotThePope 7mo agoIt’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.
- NetMageSCW 7mo agoWhy do you think people buying the cheapest MacBook available will be running Docket? Do you commonly run Docker containers on the cheapest Windows laptop available? Why not?
- ajross 7mo ago> I’ve been tempted to buy one and do “real dev work” on it just to show people it’s not this handicapped little machine. 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.
- prmph 7mo agoNo, you can't do real work on a $350 windows machine. No way such a setup is suitable for anything beyond browsing a tab or two and connecting to servers using SSH. 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.
- cosmic_cheese 7mo agoA lot of $350-ish Windows machines also don’t have SSDs but instead eMMC storage, which is dog slow and will make modern SSD-mandatory Windows feel even more awful to use. 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.
- clouedoc 7mo agoI know it's not really related, but how did you manage to build two startups worth getting acquired in such a short period of time?
- tkfoss 7mo agoDoubt this is getting answered :)
- Robdel12 7mo agoOh that made it seem like I was the driving factor. Maybe for the first one (Percy.io) I can claim a large part of that success (owning the SDKs and support end to end). The other I just owned the front end infra and was on the growth team. The rest of the folks were the stars on that one. Edit: I guess I brought that up because I guess I don't know any more "real work" that that, ha. What is 'real work'?
- clouedoc 7mo agoIt didn’t look like bragging, if that’s what you were worried about. Thnaks for answering :)
- anthonySs 7mo agomost dev workflows from pre 2021 can probably run just fine on a NEO - i think once you get into conductor / 8 terminals with claude code territory that’s where things start to slow down i just got an m5 max with 128gb of ram specifically to run local llms
- eru 7mo agoDoes Claude Code take up that many local resources? I thought the heavy lifting was in the cloud?
- deleted 7mo ago[deleted]
- ElectricalUnion 7mo agoClaude Code still runs things on your local machine. So if you have some pretty expensive transpilation, or resolving dependency trees that needs musl recompilation, or doing something rust, you still need a reasonable ammount of local firepower. More so if you're running multiple instances of them.
- Robdel12 7mo agoHeh, I also upgraded to run local LLMs. As a tiny aside, codex does not burn resources like CC does.
- coldtea 7mo ago[flagged]
- joe_mamba 7mo agodelete pls
- embedding-shape 7mo agoI dunno, I'm more afraid of the syndrome where people seemingly stop reading after a word or two, instead of reading/listening to the full context and then understanding that maybe they'll explain what they mean by that later on. Besides, almost starting to feel like something LLMs cannot replicate as easily, being strongly worded, it's a bit harder to coax commercial LLMs to be "mean" towards people, so if someone is "strongly opinionated", it almost makes the comment feel more human-like. But I digress.
- NetMageSCW 7mo agoSometimes the truth is succinct.
- joe_mamba 7mo agoIf someone would call Apple customers idiots, would they get banned for breaking HN rules? After all, they were the ones who kept buying generations of overpriced overheating intel garbage with keyboard that would break from spec of dust. Would that not also be the truth? Then why is it OK to call other people, Mac Neo skeptics in this case, idiots?
- coldtea 7mo ago>If someone would call Apple customers idiots, would they get banned for breaking HN rules? No. There's no shortage of comments of HN that do exactly that. In fact, you just imply exactly that regarding them buying "overpriced overheating intel garbage with keyboard that would break from spec of dust". Been using Wintel and Mac laptops for 30 years, and, crap keyboard aside (itself an overblown concern, had those for 5 years and never got it stuck) my Intel MBPs were still great laptops, and nothing in the Wintel world was as good except some Lenovo machines (which were good in ways the Mac laptops weren't but also the opposite). >Then why is it OK to call other people, Mac Neo skeptics in this case, idiots? For the same reason the previous case is.
- asow92 7mo agoI'm still doing iOS dev on my 2020 M1 MPB, and it's fine! I expect that if I change out its battery and apply new thermal paste it would run for another 6 years.
- embedding-shape 7mo ago> 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. 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 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.
- throwawaytea 7mo agoI still manage and develop my php/jquery saas product on a 2011 27" iMac running Linux Mint, with an SSD being the only upgrade. Runs better than most new windows machines. No complaints.
- sam_lowry_ 7mo agoI switch between Thinkpad T420s and PineBook Pro for all the hobby work. T420s has loose USB ports and the power socket is almost falling off, so I plan to replace it by a 5 years old T14 G2 in the coming months. I can afford the latest MacBook, but I'd rather not generate more e-waste that there is, and more importantly I feel closer to my users, and my code is efficient and straight to the point. My non-hobby laptop is an old cheap Dell from 5-6 years ago. The best laptop I ever had was a maxed-out Thinkpad P7x, and it came with the most meaningless job ever. I can only compare that job to the one at a unicorn that gave me the latest and greatest MacBook. Not only the job was meaningless, the whole industry made no sense to me.
- joe_mamba 7mo agoDo you have any of these meaningless jobs that come with top Macbooks to share? I am in dire need of such a job right now.
- antonyh 7mo agoIt would have been a better fit for me than the M4 Air, I literally use it only for typing and browsing, plus a could of Mac-only tools. Brilliant machine but complete overkill for me. It's almost tempting to switch just to get rid of the display notch.
- internet2000 7mo agoI'm glad enough people got M1 MacBook Airs now that the broader sentiment within the commentariat is changing and people are pushing back on the dismissals. 8gb has ALWAYS been fine in Apple Silicon Mac OS. RAM usage on a fresh boot is a meaningless statistic (unused RAM is wasted RAM). And they're just plain capable!
- ryukoposting 7mo agoI was doing Android development and Verilog synthesis on a mobile Nehalem i5 in 2020. That machine is still totally adequate for anything a "normal person" does with their computer, provided they have good tab hygeine. The reality is that (unless you play video games and/or you want local LLM inference) the demands people place on their computers haven't changed significantly in at least 10 years.
- ge96 7mo agoWould say get one with a fan, my small react native app building/indexing in xcode takes several minutes on a 2020 M1 macbook air But damn I like that design
- devmor 7mo agoThe argument is misrepresented - I think it's about frustration and convenience, not achievability. I developed some work that keeps tens of thousands of people alive every day on a $100 Acer netbook almost 15 years ago. The tools are always there, I don't think anyone thinks the work is actually impossible to do on a limited machine.
- allenu 7mo agoI was using a M1 Mac Mini and only 8GB of RAM on it to build iOS apps for maybe a year. It's absolutely doable, though it very noticeably gets a little less snappy when building projects. When building in Xcode and then switching to Firefox to browse for instance, I could tell it took slightly longer to switch tabs and YouTube playback would occasionally stutter if too much was happening. I also was using an Intel MacBook Pro with 16GB at the time. Doing the same thing there was much smoother and snappier. On the whole, it actually made me want to just the laptop instead since it "felt" nicer. (This isn't measuring build times or anything like that, just snappiness of the OS.)
- dracyr 7mo agoI just spent vacation deciding not to bring a laptop, but to use my android phone (a galaxy s22) with a hdmi adapter and Bluetooth travel keyboard. Plugged it in to the TV in our accomodation and had a lot of fun. Running neovim on termux was fine. Developing elixir was no problem, the test suite took 5s on my phone, and takes 1s on my laptop. Rust and cargo compiling was slow enough that I didn't really enjoy it though. Meant that I could just pack up instantly and have an agent do review workflows while I was out and about as well in my pocket, and didn't really notice a big battery hit.
- nabakin 7mo agoAnd nowadays we have Debian running in a VM on Android [1] [1] https://www.zdnet.com/article/how-to-use-the-new-linux-terminal-on-android/ https://www.zdnet.com/article/how-to-use-the-new-linux-termi...
- steve_adams_86 7mo agoI don't really enjoy compiling rust on my M2 Pro, so I wouldn't necessarily blame the phone
- Robdel12 7mo agoLocal LLMs and compiling rust are the only two things that I have seen saturate my M4 Max, hahaha.
- sheiyei 7mo agoInteresting vacation activities.
- compounding_it 7mo agoIkr. Vacation for me would be : get away from electronics as much as possible. Maybe stay connected with family or do payments but not beyond that.
- skeeter2020 7mo agoThis doesn't really sound like a vacation.
- harrisi 7mo agoI wrote a fix for node that got upstreamed a few years ago on a Lenovo Thinkpad 3 Chromebook. I'm actually commenting from it now. It's not a workhorse by any means, but for $99, it's not bad. A 1.1GHz Celeron processor with 4GB of memory is able to compile projects like node, python, Erlang, etc. without much hassle. It just takes a lunch break :) Any modern Mac is more than capable. I had the baseline M1 Macbook Air that I did work on as well, just to see how that fared. Much better than this machine - 10x the price, but more than 10x the performance. This one is great as a "I don't mind if I break it or lose it" device.
- jorvi 7mo agoPeople usually forget 8GB isn't 8GB. Memory compression means you can store ~2x (lz4) to 3x (zstd) as much data in memory as ordinarily. And in the worst case, reading swap from disk (writes don't matter as they can be predicted) is so much faster with NVMe SSDs. The worst corner they cut is no keyboard backlighting. That saves them what, $1 BoM per MacBook Neo? Especially because now they have to put up an entire new keyboard production line instead of just piggybacking off of the Air keyboard production line.
- noisy_boy 7mo agoIt's not cost saving, it's deliberate differentiation.
- disillusioned 7mo agoIsn't it definitionally both?
- noisy_boy 7mo agoOf course. At the same time, the cost saved is so little that you can reasonably discount it as being a meaningful contributing factor in this case.
- whatever1 7mo agoThis is PR speak. No 8GB, compressed or whatever was not enough for MacOS when M1 was released. Even for simple outlook, web browser, excel type of workflows. After 3-4 hours of work, the window manager process itself is consuming gigabytes of memory. Not even considering any browser or electron apps. My M1 Mac mini was choking up so much that I had to trade it in. That was back in 2021. Today apps are even more bloated.
- jorvi 7mo agoYeah, you never owned a Mac and are just making stuff up. I have no urge to debate zealots. Bye.
- refulgentis 7mo ago> just to show people it’s not this handicapped little machine I used to think this way about Apple and its jarring to read with it 10-15 years behind me. It reads as aggro and oddly tribalistic / sports fan-y. (what people? who thinks its slower than an M1? who thinks you can't code on it? what will you coding on it prove to these people that the benchmarks they read can't? with all that, why get so invested you're buying a machine you don't want to use day to day? what does "handicapped" mean in this context?) Only sharing b/c I never understood why people would roll their eyes at me, and apparently I finally reached my own graybeard moment, and I am now rolling my eyes at both of my selves :)
- theowaway 7mo agocool humble brag
- conrs 7mo agoNice, you beat me to this concept. I finally planted a flag and decided to dev entirely on an M3 with 8Gb. It is completely feasible, and the battery life - amazing. Even when running a whole pile of Kubernetes services.
- winrid 7mo agoAll of FastComments is/was built on an 8th gen i7 from 2017 Using older hardware has helped me not accidentally build slow stuff. Although at some point I gotta upgrade and just add more performance tests :) but nothing replaces feeling it yourself.
- whatever1 7mo ago8gb of memory is the issue. I regularly catch the window manager consuming more than 8gb on my 16gb machine. Also a browser sneeze takes more than 4gb.