Ask HN: MacBook vs. Dedicated GPU for LLM

Post by gizajob » Sat, Jun 27, 2026, 5:16 AM UTC

Frannky wrote: post #28

gizajob wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The hardware is here today for people prepared to tolerate mild amounts of latency. It’s easy to forget that computing tasks used to often take major amounts of time - rendering an audio file, rendering a video, transcoding – all kinds of tasks took minutes or even hours of the computer spinning its fans on maximum just to deliver the result. AI and agentic AI and diffusion is the next round of that - trading a small…

Hmm, I have access to A100s and a GB10, but if I use the models hosted there to code, I waste a lot of time waiting for answers and correcting errors. The amount of work I get done thanks to the quality and speed of frontier hosted models let me be insanely productive and have a lot of free time. I could use the slow local setup, but at what price?

Post by derwiki » Sat, Jun 27, 2026, 5:23 AM UTC

cylentwolf wrote: post #9

I asked a few of my friends that are ML engineers this question and all of them said to run the LLMs in the cloud with their infrastructure because it was going to be way faster. If you just want to tinker around I would look at @JSR_FDD's comment.

Post by nubg » Sat, Jun 27, 2026, 5:26 AM UTC

zepearl wrote: post #24

jpgvm wrote: post #5

If you want a massive MacBook anyway then it's great. They are decent for local LLMs, awesome for local image models and it's a MacBook so AppleCare+ has your back. IMO it's a no brainer if you wanted a MacBook anyway but it's a poor choice if your reason to buy it is to run LLMs.

I agree. To run an acceptable model (e.g. Qwen/Qwen3.6-27B or google/gemma-4-31B) with a good quantization (minimum Q5) with a good context size (min 64k) you could buy 2 or even 3 GTX 5060 16GiB VRAM for ~550$ each. Fyi the much faster MoE models were useless for my usecases - e.g not able to correctly identify me/I/you, endless thinking loops, etc. I'm currently running those models using an RTX 5070 12GiB + RTX 50…

Post by ramraj07 » Sat, Jun 27, 2026, 5:28 AM UTC

throwawaytea wrote: post #34

cylentwolf wrote: post #9

I asked a few of my friends that are ML engineers this question and all of them said to run the LLMs in the cloud with their infrastructure because it was going to be way faster. If you just want to tinker around I would look at @JSR_FDD's comment.

Next you're going to tell me that car salesman recommend just leasing new cars, doctors recommend just following the standard of care, construction workers just recommend subbing it out, and your tech friends say just use AWS.

Post by throwawaytea » Sat, Jun 27, 2026, 5:35 AM UTC

ramraj07 wrote: post #37

throwawaytea wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Next you're going to tell me that car salesman recommend just leasing new cars, doctors recommend just following the standard of care, construction workers just recommend subbing it out, and your tech friends say just use AWS.

If your car salesman friend gives you stupid advice it either means he is stupid or he is not your friend.