391–400 of 809 posts
I love my MacBook Pro M5 128GB RAM and I love qwen3.6. BUT DO NOT buy this MacBook if you plan on doing serious coding using local LLMs with it. The reason is simple: your fingers will burn and your head will explode from the noise. Running any kind of sophisticated job on the very laptop you are using is just not viable. Sure you can use it in clamshell mode, but forget touching it while working with AI coding or ag…
If I have 10k to spend, what should I buy for the best local model experience?
I love my MacBook Pro M5 128GB RAM and I love qwen3.6. BUT DO NOT buy this MacBook if you plan on doing serious coding using local LLMs with it. The reason is simple: your fingers will burn and your head will explode from the noise. Running any kind of sophisticated job on the very laptop you are using is just not viable. Sure you can use it in clamshell mode, but forget touching it while working with AI coding or ag…
I opted to buy a normal 32GB laptop for this very reason. I know how loud and hot the GPUs in my desktop run when running even smallish models like Qwen 27B or Gemma 4 31B (which is a better model for most than Qwen 3.6, despite the benchmarks). I also have a Strix Halo which doesn't get loud, because it has a single huge fan, but it does get hot. So, there's no way a laptop could work as hard as models make them wor…
I love my MacBook Pro M5 128GB RAM and I love qwen3.6. BUT DO NOT buy this MacBook if you plan on doing serious coding using local LLMs with it. The reason is simple: your fingers will burn and your head will explode from the noise. Running any kind of sophisticated job on the very laptop you are using is just not viable. Sure you can use it in clamshell mode, but forget touching it while working with AI coding or ag…
to me that's cheaper than paying an LLM provider such as Anthropic spreading FUD around open weight models & more sustainable too.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Just buy a Mac Mini really is good advice if you want to get into real, always-on convenient agentic work. Soon it is going to be good even for coding using local LLMs. Until then, just run API models on it for coding, local LLMs for "knowledge" work or daily driver agent like Hermes.
Except they're not available, 3-4 month wait time.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'd go for at least 32GB+. It'll fit in 24GB but leaves you little to no room for context, and that's at 4-bit quantization. If you want to run unquantized, you definitely need 128GB.
Nobody runs unquantized, there's literally no reason to. Q8 would be the largest anyone actually runs on consumer hardware for inference.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I also don't understand why people in this price bracket are buying Mac laptops instead of desktop computers with GPUs? Just to flex that it's portable?
Yeah, it's a much better idea to buy many used 3090s. 4090s or 5090s if you can afford it. Way faster.
You need an expensive motherboard, cooling, PSU(s) to use multiple high end GPUs together. Then there is the noise and the fact that you can't bring it on an airplane.
I find that for local coding, I need to spend a lot of time building concise SKILLs for specific things I work on and try to only enable one or two skills per coding session.
To the author of the linked article nice job, and if you feel like adding to it, please add details on your setup.
The open source models have gotten heavily conflated with local development. While that is cool and I'm excited about the future of local LLMs, it is not necessary to play around with these models. Without shilling for companies I don't have a relationship with, there are a number of companies who will give you an API just like Anthropic/OpenAI and you pay per token, albeit much cheaper than the frontier labs. I've b…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Today the Mini tops out at 48GB. Gotta go to the Studio to get 64GB.
Don't buy the Mini or Studio. Both have the M4 which lacks the Neural Accelerators, making prompt processing ~3-4x slower.