MacBook Neo, the Benchmarks | Hacker News Reader

MacBook Neo, the Benchmarks

birchtree.me

40 pointsingve16 comments

The 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.

Good 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.

You know A) most people aren’t doing “dev workflows” and B) Apple sells other computers?

Sure. Was talking about my use case. Probably should've been clearer.

One 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.

good 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

I'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.

*MacBook

> "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.

In $600 PCs?

Yes, 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-lapto...

6200 MB/s Read, 4300 MB/s Write

vs the 699€ Macbook Neo:

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.

Not 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...

As 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.

Sustained write speed is usually important as these things heat up and often aren't cooled properly. Which is not hard to test.

> 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.

Matt has some of the best content on MacBook Neo, enjoyed reading it.

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