These technologies aren't useful just for storing data. Yes, you can do that on your MacBook. These are useful for when you need answers quickly or need to perform complex analysis. For example, spark (the engine behind shark) allows you to run things like logistic regressions at scale in just a few seconds. As far as I know, you can't load 150GB of data into memory in R on your MacBook and then run a logistic regression a few seconds later.