4 ms·
MacBook Neo, the Benchmarks
- ymolodtsov 7mo agoMatt has some of the best content on MacBook Neo, enjoyed reading it.
- chocochunks 7mo ago> "What I will say is that in recent years, Apple has really accelerated the performance of their SSDs. And this has been a key part of the argument as to why PCs are absolute trash." Umm, for the past 5+ years or so PC SSDs have have generally been as fast or faster than what Apple has been shipping. When Apple moved to NVMe they did so before the PC industry for the most part and had some advantage but they got eclipsed.
- raw_anon_1111 7mo agoIn $600 PCs?
- chocochunks 7mo agoYes, even in $600 PCs. The SSD in the Neo is not particularly good either. Here's an example, a 649€ laptop: https://www.notebookcheck.net/Lenovo-IdeaPad-Slim-5-15-laptop-review-Great-value-for-money-with-an-AMD-SoC-and-an-aluminum-case.945877.0.html https://www.notebookcheck.net/Lenovo-IdeaPad-Slim-5-15-lapto... 6200 MB/s Read, 4300 MB/s Write vs the 699€ Macbook Neo: https://www.notebookcheck.net/Apple-MacBook-Neo-Review-Surprisingly-good-and-capable-laptop-for-599-with-one-big-flaw.1247679.0.html#c15779363 https://www.notebookcheck.net/Apple-MacBook-Neo-Review-Surpr... 1550 MB/s Read, 1500 MB/s Write The Neo is well below the class average.
- saltcured 7mo agoNot knowing these devices personally, I'll just say I find most of these sorts of SSD performance summaries completely useless. Too often, specs or even shallow benchmarks report little more than some theoretical peak speed from system to SSD controller RAM buffers, without any real information about reads or writes that actually go all the way to the solid state storage cells. And even when they do go all the way, they fail to really highlight performance variance for different realistic workloads...
- wtallis 7mo agoAs a general rule: any SSD benchmark that gives you a result of over 1GB/s is not measuring what's actually most important for day to day interactive use. And anything that's within a factor of two of the SSD's marketing numbers is probably relevant only to copying a single file to or from another SSD.
- Melatonic 7mo agoSustained write speed is usually important as these things heat up and often aren't cooled properly. Which is not hard to test.
- justinclift 7mo ago> 6200 MB/s Read, 4300 MB/s Write That's in bursts though, not sustained. Though, that's probably completely fine for the target users for these devices.
- sibtain1997 7mo agoGood read. I get the point about real world usage, but I still feel like Neo might fall short with how fast things are getting heavier, especially with Node and modern dev workflows. Feels fine today, but not sure how well it holds up a couple years down the line.
- raw_anon_1111 7mo agoYou know A) most people aren’t doing “dev workflows” and B) Apple sells other computers?
- sibtain1997 7mo agoSure. Was talking about my use case. Probably should've been clearer.
- adgjlsfhk1 7mo agoOne thing to note is that you can apparently get a ~30% heavy use speedup by adding a thermal pad between the CPU and the case. Stock, the Neo has a 6W TDP, but thermal throttles to 3W after <1s of multicore work because there is no heat dissipation for the chip. With an $8 thermal pad, the CPU can stay at 6W because it no longer hits 105C instantly.
- sibtain1997 7mo agogood tip, just offload the heavy stuff to a vps and keep the neo for light tasks. thermal pad helps but why fight the hardware when you can throw compute elsewhere
- bfrog 7mo agoThe thing here is I doubt many people care that it’s a little slower. The price point makes it an excellent computer without a decent operating system. The alternative is a crappy computer with a horrible operating system.
- musicale 7mo agoI'm writing this on an intel MacBook Pro, so I expect that the Mac Neo probably has very usable performance, while running cooler and with longer battery life.
- musicale 7mo ago*MacBook