Can an 8 GB Raspberry Pi 4 Replace Your MacBook Pro for a Full Workday?

Background

At the end of May a new 8 GB Raspberry Pi 4 was announced for $75. Jeff Geerling, a popular YouTube creator, decided to replace his MacBook Pro with this Pi for a full workday to see how it performed.

Step 1: Connecting Devices

He unplugged his MacBook from a CalDigit TS3 Plus hub and connected a powered USB‑C hub to the Pi, then attached the following peripherals:

Kensington 240 GB SSD in an Inateck USB‑3.0 SATA enclosure

Apple Magic Keyboard

Apple Magic Trackpad

Behringer U‑Phoria USB 3.0 audio interface

Logitech C920 webcam

He also used the official Raspberry Pi 4 USB‑C power supply and a micro‑HDMI‑to‑HDMI adapter for a 27‑inch 4K monitor.

Step 2: Re‑configuring the Display

Because the Pi cannot output 4K @ 60 Hz over HDMI, he spent about 30 minutes adjusting font sizes and enabling “pixel doubling” to make UI elements readable at 4K @ 30 Hz. He eventually settled on 1080p output to reduce GPU load, enable anti‑aliasing, and achieve a stable 60 Hz refresh for video playback.

Step 3: Workflow and Applications

He replaced his usual apps with ARM‑compatible alternatives:

Chromium for web browsing

VSCodium instead of Sublime Text (Sublime lacks an ARM64 build)

Rclone in place of Dropbox (failed to compile Dropbox on Pi OS)

Pidgin and LimeChat for chat

He noted that many popular tools (e.g., Feedly reader, Cawbird for Twitter) either lacked ARM builds or required Snap, adding friction.

Step 4: Problems Discovered

Several tasks that are trivial on a Mac proved difficult on the Pi:

RSS reading required a clunky web UI because no ARM Feedly client existed.

Twitter client Cawbird suffered frequent crashes and required Snap installation.

Finding ARM64 Docker images for some projects was problematic.

He also spent time compiling source code and creating desktop shortcuts for custom apps.

Step 5: Multimedia Challenges

Recording audio/video was the biggest hurdle. The Logitech C920’s built‑in H.264 encoder allowed direct capture, but configuring audio required identifying the correct ALSA devices.

$ arecord --list-devices
**** List of CAPTURE Hardware Devices ****
card 2: U192k [UMC202HD 192k], device 0: USB Audio [USB Audio]
card 3: C920 [HD Pro Webcam C920], device 0: USB Audio [USB Audio]

He used two FFmpeg commands to capture video and audio:

# Capture sound and video from webcam
ffmpeg -ar 44100 -ac 2 -f alsa -i hw:3,0 -f v4l2 -codec:v h264 -framerate 30 -video_size 1920x1080 -itsoffset 0.5 -i /dev/video0 -copyinkf -codec:v copy -codec:a aac -ab 128k -g 10 -f mp4 test.mp4

# Sound from Behringer, video from webcam
ffmpeg -ar 44100 -ac 2 -f alsa -acodec pcm_s32le -i hw:2,0 -f v4l2 -codec:v h264 -framerate 30 -video_size 1920x1080 -itsoffset 0.5 -i /dev/video0 -copyinkf -codec:v copy -codec:a aac -ab 128k -g 10 -f mp4 test-webcam-audio.mp4

He discovered the Pi’s CPU cannot encode 1080p in real time without hardware assistance; using a camera without built‑in encoding dropped to 5‑8 fps.

Conclusion

The 8 GB Raspberry Pi 4 is perfectly adequate for command‑line work, coding, and browsing with Chromium, but it struggles with heavy multimedia, professional video editing, and some ARM‑incompatible apps. For users whose workflow is lightweight, the Pi offers excellent price‑performance; for power users needing tools like Final Cut Pro, a traditional laptop remains necessary.