Apple's new entry-level MacBook Neo surprised testers by handling big data workloads despite its modest specs. Powered by the 6-core Apple A18 Pro chip, the $700 laptop packs 8GB RAM and either 256GB or 512GB storage. The device lacks a charging brick in EU markets, shipping only with a USB-C cable.

Benchmarks using ClickBench and TPC-DS revealed impressive performance for a budget machine. In cold runs, the MacBook Neo completed all queries in under a minute, outperforming cloud instances with network-attached storage. Hot runs showed the laptop still competitive, beating a mid-sized cloud instance on median query times despite having fewer CPU threads and less RAM.

The MacBook Neo's NVMe SSD proved crucial for initial performance, though its 1.5 GB/s speed lagged behind premium MacBook models. Memory constraints became apparent with larger datasets, with some queries requiring extensive disk spilling. While not ideal for daily big data processing, the laptop demonstrated that DuckDB can effectively handle substantial workloads on modest hardware.