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I'm surprised no one has else has mentioned - low power mode.

With no speculative decoding, using high power mode, I get 80 t/s on 35B A3B - and it gets hot and spins up. On low power mode I get 38 t/s - no fans, cool to warm laptop.

If you currently don't use speculative decoding and you start using it, it can nearly offset the difference between high and low power, and it's night and day experience.

I almost always keep my laptop on low power mode.

> MacBook Pro M5 128GB RAM

614 GB/s of memory bandwidth

> MacMini M4 with 64GB of RAM

273 GB/s of memory bandwidth (also only currently available with 48GB)

When it comes to inference speed, you want your model to fit in memory, and then to have as much memory bandwidth as possible. In this case a hypothetical Mini with 1TB of memory would still be over 2x slower with 27-35B models.

And FWIW I have an M4 Max MBP 128GB that I keep on a Roost laptop stand, with a separate keyboard/mouse/video. It does fire up the cooling jets when running local LLMs, but stays within tolerance for me on noise. I haven't heat-tested it on longer runs, but I imagine the risen airflow helps a ton.

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 work, and not be unbearable. Tiny fans trying to remove all that heat? They gotta be screaming. No reason to spend all that money on a laptop that I couldn't realistically make use of. I do run a lot of VMs on my desktop, but I can get to those on a VPN.

It's a nice idea to run a model on a laptop so you can work anywhere...but, that's a job for models in the cloud. Not much data has to traverse the network, so it's not a big deal. Or one could also setup a VPN so you can reach a self-hosted model on a big box at home for things that require data privacy.

All that said, there are models that work great on very small devices for some tasks and won't work it to death. Gemma 4 12B QAT 4-bit runs on a 16GB device, maybe even smaller, including a tablet. It's the best self-hostable vision model I've tested for my purposes (categorization, identification, labeling, type stuff), beating much larger models. It's also a decent conversationalist with good prose but it doesn't know much of anything (not a lot of the world fits in 7GB), so it needs search if you want to use it for research. It's a pretty good tool user. I definitely wouldn't want to use it for code, though, beyond very simple stuff.

Yikes! I've been needing an upgrade, and I was on the fence between a specc'd out MBP, or building out a AI server and delegating tasks to it over Netbird/Tailscale to my homelab.

I'm mainly interested in coding/image creation tasks. Has anyone built out a server for a similar use-case and, if so, whats your experience been? What cards should I be looking into? Am I looking at spending ~10-15k for something that can give me near frontier quality/speed? I know about the DGX Spark/Mac Mini's, but I'd like to be able to upgrade later down the road.

> The reason is simple: your fingers will burn and your head will explode from the noise.

So, just buy a mac mini and put it in the other room? ( Like everyone was doing in February? :)

I've been running coding agents on my laptop in yolo mode for the past half year or so (though mostly not local ones, laptop too slow!) and the way I'm doing that without terror is that I just gave them their own Linux user "agent". They're free to nuke their homedir /agent, and they can't touch (or even read) mine.

There's some slight ergonomics issues (I need to sudo into the user to do anything, but I set up an alias for it), sometimes I get issues with permissions or ownership (gave up on "sticky bits" and just made a function I can run once a day when it breaks).

There's enough hassle that I wish I just had a dedicated machine for it, and then I'd just give them root on it. (For giggles I gave claude root on a $3 VPS and that's going just fine...)

But yeah after months of trial and error I reinvented "just buy a mac mini" from first principles...

In general if you're setting up a local LLM you should assume it's going to be primarily working as a server and talking to various clients. I use my MBP, but that's because I don't travel much anymore so it can happily work as a server at all times. With the right agent setup you can probably manage most things from your phone even if you don't have a seperate machine to use as a client.

I have an older laptop I run a hermes agent on backed by an API based open (non-local) model and Macbook Pro M4 for running another model locally (also using hermes). The agents have a Mattermost (open source version of slack) server they run and I run Mattermost on my phone so I can talk to them and task them with things. In fact, it was through the hermes WhatsApp endpoint that I got the first agent (non-local) to setup the Mattermost server and unboard the second agent (local mbp).

Then I can just chat with them through Mattermost when I need work done. Whenever I need something done I just hope on the Mattermost server and chat with them. I've had them build me multiple research reports (the fully local agent did awesome at this), learn how to use Stable Diffusion on my desktop to generate images, install and perform maintenance on various local services I run (including Open WebUI).

I am using MacBook Pro M4 with 64GB of RAM and I have it on direct path of air conditioning airflow, 40ish cm from the device, while running LM Studio opened to network. No noise, not hot to the touch.

Using linux for actual work on my workstation.

I have that model, and do local LLMs and local image generation. DO buy this if you plan on serious local LLM use and enjoy working from anywhere.

Don't expect workstation loads with no fan or heatsink, true. But it's not a real problem, it's still quieter than a desktop.

That said, rather than Mac Mini, if you only work from one place, I'd recommend a Studio Ultra M3 with 512GB. Same or more tokens per second, multiple models loaded. Cool and quiet.

Nope, have both these machines, can confirm the M5 max blows the M4 mini away. It does get hot, but I use it mostly with an external monitor and keyboard. Conceptually I like the headless model better with a workstation, but work was buying the M5 and can't get it in any other form factor at the monute.

Apple does not sell a 64GB variant of the M4 Mac Mini. IIRC they never have; its always capped out at 48GB.

If you were planning on getting an M5 128GB; just get a DGX Spark (~$4500) or a 5090-equipped machine (~$4500) plus a Macbook Air (~$1500). You'll come in below the M5 Max 128 pricing (~$6700+ USD) and be happier for it.

I think there is no reasonably priced machine you could run locally to do serious work with LLMs...

10x rtx6000 Pro in a large workstation is probably the way to go for someone wanting to run GLM5.2.

Other than that it is cloud.

As good as these small models got we are still not "at breakeven" for me.

What is "breakeven" with LLMs? For me it is when I no longer have to read the actual code it wrote. I can trust that if I told it to implement and document a certain architecture it actually did that with no stupid mistakes.

The first model ever that did that for me was the first opus. 4.4 if I remember correctly.

The second model was Gemini 3 Pro preview. For few weeks. Then it was lobotomised. I guess it was too expensive to run and they quantized it too hell.

Only Opus remains. If this GLM model truly rivals even an old opus I'll be very happy when day comes that I'll be able to run it locally.

Would the new upcoming AMD AI ryzen halo desktop be a better value offer? or dgx spark?

You would have to get a third party reseller/scalper or refurbished mac mini to get 64gb of ram ever since apple stopped selling it.

I have an M4 Max and when I was trying out local LLM work with pi it has probably felt like the hottest I've ever felt any kind of Macbook be. I could feel the radiated heat off it even a few inches away. Honestly felt hotter than any Intel Macbook I've used. Because of that I stopped as I didn't want to harm my laptop in case I need to hold it for 10 years due to all the supply issues/price increases.

running potentially sota open-weight models locally only became a thing in fall 2023.

if a hardware cycle takes ~3 years then fall 2026 would be the first possible device generation where apple exploits its advantage with the unified ram architecture.

more realistically, spring 2027, since they probably also needed some time to make up their minds to lean into that on the top end.

that`s also how i would interpret the recent rumors on m6 and m7.

naturally, the cooling and all that will be optimized around that.

so the first devices that are actually intended and designed for this use case will come at the earliest this fall and more likely in q1/q2 next year.

you are basically paying the price now to be on the bleeding (sweating) edge

Try using DwarfStar 4 and use the --power flag: https://github.com/antirez/ds4#reducing-heat-power-usage-and...

This. Do consider local LLMs, but set aside a dedicated machine for it. Connect via VPN or reverse proxy. If it's not a Mac them I'd also put a server distro on it. No need for a desktop environment, save your RAM.

That's exactly what I'm doing -- Mini M4 Pro 64GB, qwen3.6.

My hearing is not great, but I think I would have noticed the fan, and I have never heard it. In fact, I had to google to find out if it even has a fan.

If you want to do coding with a local LLM your best bet is a 6 year old Nvidia 3090 which is substantially more powerful than the highest end overhyped Apple product for 1/5th the price.

So the sweet spot for dev in 2026 is 64k context windows? Are we back in 2024?

As more context will degrade a lot the t/s. On top this is 1 slot.

If you use sub agents the kv cache will be invalidated with colliding request and make it even slower.

So the in real world 256k (the max qwen offer) and using 3-4 slots the numbers are very different.

This is the major issue with so many postes over local models not benchmarking real world use. Real context and not taking this in context.

If you use 1 slot the issue, you loose the ability of using sub agents when exploring and all end up in the main agent context overloading it, triggering compactation and oh boy with 64k context that compecation will be an endless loop.

What tasks you would really be able to do with 64k context 1 agent? For sure so quick edits but not complex planning where you need to ingest a lot files and end up loosing 80% of the ingested files to compactation.

You can use a fan app to ramp up how fast the fans spin instead of the default so you can prevent any throttling

I'm running an M5 Max 128GB with Qwen 3.6 and unreal engine in the background and it seems to be ok for me. Quite a power drain if it's not plugged in but I haven't seen any thermal issues.

I wonder if that's why there is such a good selection of 128gb M5 MBP's on the Apple Certified Refurbished store lol https://www.apple.com/ca/shop/refurbished/mac/macbook-pro-12...

No laptop is thermally designed to handle sustained high workloads. The whole point of a laptop is to keep it thin, quiet and light, the exact opposite of what cooling needs.

Don't forget that your OLED screen will start to color-shift as the heat cooks the panel!

Or just buy an R9700 and put it in the basement?

You can't buy Mac Mini with 64GB RAM today. Most what you can have is 48GB

It's okay, completely wrong thread for this statement, but I wouldn't voluntarily use current MacOS (no idea if the older variants weren't terrible) over anything but ssh. Worse than Windows 11.

Apple does not currently sell a Mac Mini with 64GB RAM.

I just checked apple's website and configured them:

Mac Studio: Ships: 16–18 weeks

Mac mini: Ships: 10–12 weeks

Yes, it gets really hot really fast.

As much as I was tempted to use it on longer projects, I had some reservations about whether it would put too much strain on my MacBook.

Thank you - I was very close but thanks to chores and availability haven't pulled the trigger. You are very convincing.

They really need to release those updated Studios already.

The Q6_K gguf fits nicely on a 24GB GPU. That's amazing.

> If you want to run Qwen3.6 27B / 35B at its best, get a MacMini M4 with 64GB of RAM and put it in the basement - or at least a few meters from your desk.

Can confirm this works rather well, most things that integrate with LLMs, (agents, editors), support providing a remote (LAN) URL for Ollama, LM Studio etc.

But you do need a fast LAN connection, otherwise working with agents will be a pain.

A local model on my m2 made me come to that conclusion but I definitely was having “that config is $2k more” regret. Thanks for posting this!

You can get some work done by using low power mode even when plugged in, and making your fan start running when the temps just start to rise (maybe 40 degrees. Use a third party fan app to set it up

I am considering getting something like NVIDIA's RTX Spark when it comes out, though even that will be limited to 128GB.

Can you define "serious programming"? Because I use it to implement things I COULD go and figure out like algorithms or test generation or evaluations etc, the "serious" programming I tend to do myself. That is what I'm paid for.

What sort of M5 are you running? A max? MacMini's don't offer max CPUs.

>Sure you can use it in clamshell mode

Wouldn't this damage the MBP display?

My RTX laptop has air intake underneath the keyboard and clamshell mode is surely a recipe for disaster; I've taken numerous measures to ensure that the laptop doesn't stay awake when the lid is down.

Your MacBook will not last running current big LLMs on these hardware. The heat will wear on it.

I completely disagree, it is probably the best platform currently for this - and the way I run it is as a server with tailscale accessible from my coding machine (same as you suggest here) - the difference is that you can stop the server, use it as a video editing rig on a whim, or use it for training instead of inference (yes PyTorch has caught up and Metal is a great platform for this now).

It’s just so flexible, and I even use it in agent mode (ds4) directly on the machine as well sometimes (it’s really not that bad, I’m often running inference for small side projects on my couch), if there is another machine that can do all of this and still function as one of the more ergonomic, well built, and compact laptops out there, I’d love to hear what it is cause I’d likely be interested!

TBF, I just recently picked up this same model, and it's reminding me of the last gen Intel i9 MBP. Just visiting any non-basic website spins up the fans and battery life isn't great either. Yes, this thing is fast, but damn it gets hot just using it for normal tasks.

Still, I don't agree. I think this machine is meant to use local models. You just have to wear pants if you want to keep it directly on your lap. I rarely use it that way anyway. I prefer it plugged into an external display and comfortably sitting on a laptop stand.

This -- with the M5 Max MBP is running flat out, you'll go from full battery to empty in under two hours.

While it is wild to have this much power in a take-it-anywhere laptop form factor, I sort of regret not just going for a Mac Studio + base M5 MBP.

Get an OEM Spark instead, mine are silent and can fit 2 qwen/gemma at 8bit or give you room for a bunch of other, smaller models (embed,rerank,etc)

Mac Mini in the rack and a Neo in the lap.

No, buy a framework desktop.

With 128 you can run 122b ;)

Today the Mini tops out at 48GB. Gotta go to the Studio to get 64GB.

Also look into buying the Mac mini refurbished from Apple. They come almost brand new, same warranty and you save money.

You could use an external keyboard?

What kind of speed in tk/s do you get with the MacBook?

This is a very exaggerated take. I have an Apple M5 Max with 128 GB ram running 15'ish Coasts (coasts.dev) environments, each of them running postgress, python, redis and FE stack + locally running voice models and face swap models .. and the only time the fan kicks in is when I open multiple google analytics tabs.

Are you sure you're running it with MLX?

Same. And your M5 has acceleration that I don’t with my M3 max. I can’t do anything local it gets hotter than an Intel Mac trying to run docker from back in the day.

Very surprised an Apple device can have some atrocious ventilation design.

I'm running this model on a Framework 13 and the chassis barely heats up at all while running full tilt.

How is Mac studio 32gb or 96 gb ram one?

why not buy one of those "a.i" desktop kits being sold by Nvidia/AMD and just connect to them via network ?

to me that's cheaper than paying an LLM provider such as Anthropic spreading FUD around open weight models & more sustainable too.

>If you want to run Qwen3.6 27B / 35B at its best, get a MacMini M4 with 64GB of RAM and put it in the basement

Im sorry, but its time to start calling Apple sycophants out. Stop trying to push your tech jewelry on other people. You only buy those computers because they are Apple, you don't know anything about computing or running LLMs, you don't do any real work, so you should probably not give advice on what to buy.

A single 3090 will run Qwen3.6 27b fine, and its VRAM speed is twice of what the best Mac has. And the build will be cheaper. Decent CPU/Motherboard, 32gb of DDR4 ram, an SSD and a Single 3090 should run max about $4grand. Mac m4 mini is 6grand.

Then, when gpu prices come down (or you find one on a deal), you can upgrade the card, or stick a second one, and benefit from more speed. You can't do that with the trash Apple produces.

Flag me if you want, I don't care. Its embarrasing for the tech community to give advice this bad.

The maths there is pretty undeniable, but it is not where I'd make the split. Having a machine that can run some modest local LLMs, like the Gemma 4 12B, is really worth it.

I don't know how much serious hands-free agentic coding I will ever do on my MacBook alone, but I do know that I would not have got so far into understanding this without tinkering with local models, llama.cpp, LM Studio, and LM Studio and all that.

I totally struggled to find the right frame of mind to explore any of this stuff without feeling defeated and bamboozled. Because it's just huge, exhausting, jargon-drenched, unknowable, and I am over the hill at fifty-plus.

Until, that is, I could poke around with setting it up on my own (secondhand) machine, watching the API calls, understanding some of the terminology. I didn't even buy the machine for that; it's just adequate to the task.

The Neo is too small to really get much benefit from this opportunity to make it more visceral and knowable.

You can also run Qwen 3.6 27B dense model on DGX Spark with comparable performance [1][2] for about $4000 (Asus Ascent GX10 is $3999 at various retailers).

In theory you can also get 48GB of VRAM with, say, two 3090s, but it will take up a lot of space and generate a lot of heat compared to the Macbook Pro and GB10.

[1] https://x.com/MiaAI_lab/status/2070859135399182444

[2] https://github.com/MiaAI-Lab/Qwen3.6-27B-NVFP4-vLLM

The model they reference can be easily run with 24gb+ of VRAM, and there are other similar models capable of running easily on 16gb of VRAM. It's not like 128gb is a requirement here.

But the tokens or credits are gone. MacBook stays. You can run other models on the same MacBook. What I read people burn every month on saas… for that money you break even on that MacBook in 5 months.

Edit: it’s not just “data privacy”, when you are using Claude, you are shipping EVERYTHING to Anthropic. It’s crazy.

That $6700 is a $5000 upgrade over a base model Macbook Pro.

$5000 in US Treasuries (currently at 4.89%) yields $244.5/yr. That's more than enough to cover the annual Claude Pro subscription ($200/yr) which includes Claude Code with lots of Sonnet usage (far better than Qwen 3.6)

I'm running it on my 4070 12gb with 96gb mem, I'm very happy with the results even if I have to wait a couple minutes for results. To me this is far better than I expected and will continue to use it and improve with skills.md. Pi.dev is amazing by the way.

> The article is based on running Qwen 3.6 on a 128GB MacBook Pro. For reference, a 128GB MBP currently starts at $6699 USD [0]

Qwen3.6-27B would be faster on a 3090 that costs around $1000-1200 though so I don't think it's a good counter-argument.

Op just happened to have that MacBook, but it doesn't mean it's necessary to run the model.

Just putting it out there: I run Qwen 3.6 on my M1 Mac Studio with 64gb. It's quantized and all that, but I agree with TFA: it's the sweet spot for local development right now.

For that price you can put together a PC with 128GB of ram ($2000) and an RTX 5090 ($3600) and get 70-100 tokens per second instead of 45

Isn't the directionality important. I.e. it is currently possible to run useful / great models locally, but on high end machines; and in a few years we will likely be able to run even better models on standard machines.

I run Qwen 3.6 on my Framework Desktop 128GB, and it's very performant. I know Framework has had to raise the price since I preordered mine, but they're still well under half the cost of that Macbook.

You can get an AMD Strix Halo with half that price even after hardware price adjustments. Besides you don't need 128GB of RAM to run a 27B model.

I’m running the same model on a 48GB MBP with a q4 quant and it’s pretty decent. You definitely don’t 128GB. That’s the scale for 70B models at q8 or something.

I’ve got qwen3.6 27b running on my media server atm. Given that I built on top of what I already had, it didn’t cost me nearly that amount. I’ve been running 2x 5060 ti 16gbs, and when using text only and nvfp4, I can run the model with 200k context length and roughly 50-60 toks. It’s very good, and costed me about $800 after buying the gpus from microcenter.

I have a 1500 dollar machine that can run it at 50 tok/s (3 V100s)

I still dont trust the Anthopic and OpenAI are not training on my code. I even just thinking keeping track of what code you have received in prompts and to train/not train on it seems like an impossibly difficult task.

I bought 2 used 3090s some years ago for $500 each. They're probably a bit more expensive now, but I guess for something like $2000 you can build a barebones 2x3090 PC which will be way faster than a Macbook. (you're fine with very basic hardware outside the GPUs)

All experiments with Qwen 3.6 required no more than 48GB Apple Silicon. I believe you can go even further with more aggressive quantizations - one can go down even further.

In any cases, from the economic point of view, running models on laptops make little sense. Even at the pure cost of energy consumption, it might be hard to beat pricing at tokens generated at scale.

At the same time, it is a breaktrough, that will change the game. Previously such vibe coding on consumer device was not hard or costly - it was impossible.

Yes. It is very expensive now. I'm still so so happy I decided last summer to bite the bullet and pre-ordered the Framework Desktop 128GB model.

I paid 2424 euros in total for this machine. And it can easily run the models discussed in the comments and in the article. It's tiny, and runs CachyOS like a champ. Over 4000 euros less than the price you listed.

We can all send a thank you letter for our friendly billionaires such as Sam Altman for the price situation we're in today: https://www.mooreslawisdead.com/post/sam-altman-s-dirty-dram...

Runs fine on 2x4080s or on two 5060/5070s with 16GBVRAM... and faster than on the mac.

Absolutely for the average developer the token speed is just going to be too slow for it to be workable. I think we’re looking at 2028 when memory becomes cheaper again and they’ll be a lot more people using local models.

AMD started their 128GB Halo Strix at a pretty damn good point at ~2.5k; I got mine after the first memory bump at $3k.

I think you might be a little to into the stew here.

But you have to factor in that this device will last you 5-10 years. That said, I wouldn't spend almost $7k USD on this macbook lol.

i like that people are taking the privacy argument seriously, after however many decades. i think there are other arguments to be made for running these locally which are less settled, but IMO the Fable debacle drives it home: the surest way to embrace this technology without worry that it will be taken away from you down the road is to physically own the compute.

Oh definitely. I've seen GLM 5.2 go for around $4 per million output tokens.

a lot of credits? we can’t predict any price change for them

Doesnt it run on the Macbook Neo... just slower?

How many credits would it buy? How long would it take to use them up? What's the payback period?

From what I understand, for a developer, $5000/month is maybe the high end, but $5000/year is fairly standard. (Is that accurate?) So if it pays back in 15 months, that's pretty decent. If it pays back in two months, that's spectacular.

[flagged]

> Being able to nail a zero-shot greenfield project is relatively easy even for a small model

Not really germane to your comment but I hope I don’t sound old when I say I remember a time when spinning up a PoC was a week of work, and a statement like yours was pure science fiction.

> and it can fall back to similar examples in the training data easily.

This is an underrated consideration when evaluating the small models: The further you deviate from standard example code, the more their weaknesses show.

My experience is that Qwen3.6 produced some amazing results for a small model when I tried it with simple apps that are widely reproduced everywhere. If you want a React TODO app or to set up a little boilerplate app with shadcn and other popular tools, it will produce something that looks not too bad.

Then when I started straying outside of common tasks and into some of my more niche work, it would spin for hours and go in circles before finally producing some groan-inducing output that wasn't usable.

If you're looking for a model to help with simple refactoring or small tasks where you provide very explicit instructions for exactly what you want, but you don't want to do all of the typing yourself, they can do a lot of good work, though. But you're right that once you get into long context sessions involving topics off the beaten path, the weaknesses are very apparent.

The quantizations that are popular for making these models fit on smaller hardware make the problems worse. When you read it about online there is almost a consensus that 4-bit quants are lossless and that you can use q8_0/q8_0 kv cache quantization without any real loss, but in my experience with real projects there's a substantial degradation in long context performance with any of these quants.

I have been using pi (and previously the codex cli) with Qwen 3.6 27b with 100k context for my development at work, and I have been very blown away by how well it works. It's not perfect, but it's enough to accelerate my normal development flow. I mostly use it for writing Go and C#.

In my experience, even with basic project concepts the small models struggle to spin up greenfield stuff. There's just too many decisions to be made and they're not good at that.

Modifying existing code is way easier if you don't expect it to be smart about it. Don't say "add X feature" and let it explore the codebase and build its own understanding. Point it at the relevant files and say "the goal is to add X feature to this code, follow Y guidelines". Now you've done the hardest part of making the decisions and it just has to follow instructions while coloring within the lines.

There are several general types of tasks that a Gemma 4 12B class model works for me, including: 1) design a large project composed of small libraries that can be coded and tested in isolation. 2) clean up old coding projects: add README files, comment code, show an example of using a new API and have it update API use, etc.

All small-scale stuff. For large integrated projects I am finding DeepSeek v4 Pro commercial API to be very inexpensive and helps me produce good results.

Exactly. If the repo has all of the knowledge living inside of it that window fills up fast, even when using something like codegraph.

I don't use local models but have you tried augmenting the model with code intelligence MCPs like https://github.com/DeusData/codebase-memory-mcp ?

> In my limited experiments Qwen 3.5 (maybe 3.6 is loads better)

1. Maybe you should tell us what those limited experiments are.

2. Maybe you should actually try 3.6 because it's huge difference in most cases. Don't forget to tell us quants and don't forget to tell us scope.

3. Maybe actually show us data compared to frontier models instead of this... vibe comment. Pretty tired of this kind of comments on HN that doesn't require logic or evidence. Just vibes. Like the pelican riding a bicycle crap that everyone has taken for granted but has no objective way of assessing goodness.

Well, I can tell you how my thinking goes: 1) I don't buy my computer just to run LLMs and there are many scenarios where I benefit from both a decent GPU and from a large amount of RAM, 2) I run a solo-founder business which owns exactly one computer in the entire company so it might as well be a good one, and 3) I don't need a new car, so comparing pricing this way is irrelevant.

In other words, yes, buying this kind of machine only to run an LLM locally doesn't make sense, because local LLMs generally still suck for serious programming work (they work great for spam filtering though!). But more generally this machine makes sense for a lot of people.

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?

I think it's silly to go for a laptop form factor. Last fall I put together a workstation with two second-hand 3090s in it (paid $850CDN each, now the best I can find is $1200). With 48GB VRAM it's reasonable - and I've been using Qwen 3.6 27B for various tasks around building KGs from text corpora / reasoning about them.

I've ran comparisons against everything that's available on OpenRouter (well, as of few weeks ago), and for $0/tok, the local 27B Qwen can't be beat. Sure, it's slower, and yeah, the office is a few degrees warmer than it ought to be -- but nobody can pull the plug, nobody is watching over my shoulder, and the results are on par with SOTA.

Can't wait for a similarly sized Qwen 3.7 - from what I've seen so far, it's a leap ahead of the previous version.

If your workflow benefits from the speed it quickly pays for itself when factoring in developer salaries here in the US. I recently switched companies and they bought me an M5 Max 128GB as my dev machine.

Builds and local test runs are 3 times faster than the Windows laptop option. The machine will pay for itself just based on that within 3 months. I can spin up a local kubernetes cluster and do full integration tests while I am working on other things as well.

It isn’t a strictly Mac vs Windows thing though. It looks like the culprit is the MDM software on the Windows machines is just crazy slow and constantly getting in the way.

If I was paid less it would definitely make less sense for the company to pay for this machine.

It’s an asset on my balance sheet that’s already appreciating nicely and will likely be resale-able for what I paid for it for the next 7-10 years. I am on an Apple monthly installment plan so $5k is $416/month for 1 year, no interest. I’m able to run DS4 scale models and other open models without quantization, often multiple at once.

Imagine its value if war broke out over Taiwan / Greater China, or really any of the dark scenarios with global connectivity or the truthiness of commercially available models. It is a very, very difficult piece of equipment to make at any other moment in history. I wish I could have purchased more. I saw the signs and price trends and out of stocks as they unfolded. No doubt others with the means are stockpiling.

> Are developers in other countries living in such different worlds?

Yes. Your people earn an order of magnitude less income than Americans.

Yes they are, 6k is peanuts to a lot of people.

It's not always about the price or being the cheapest. For me, it's about freedom, both to play and from the govt/corp censorship.

> Are developers in other countries living in such different worlds?

Yes. Back in the my days at $faang in europe it was not uncommon to hear people getting 120-160 k€/year in compensation and we were “poor” compared to us engineers at the same faang (4-500 k$/year total compensation) with a bit of seniority…

I try to always mention that AMD ROCm has come a long way. Like the B70 the Radeon AI Pro 9700 has 32GB of DDR6 640GB/s. Also $1300 a card. Very capable cards now in mid 2026. Great for dense models in the 30B range. I'd go strix halo or DGX spark if you want to run the 120B range of MOE models.

A 3090 never came with 32gb of vram

I got B70 few days ago. Running on CachyOS. 9070XT on PCIe x16 and B70 on the x4.

ROCm nightly was pretty easy to setup and get up running. The 9070XT has been a decent card for my use cases.

But the SYCL ecosystem versions. Absolutely horrendous and everything is hundred commits behind. Vulkan is probably the only way forward with this card.

Interesting that Intels latest consumer GPUs only have 10 and 12GB respectively for the B570 and B580.

Even with deepseek v4 flash I burned though $5 in credits in a day just playing around with Hermes, and qwen 3.6 35B is significantly more expensive.

I can run qwen 3.6 35B on my gaming PC at around 50 tok/s and other than power cost of a tiny bit extra per month, it's hardware I already owned from years ago.

I'm not really sure why qwen 3.6 35B is so expensive on openrouter, it seems abnormally high for what hardware it takes to run it.

If you're not good at prompting yet, that $10 doesn't go very far. The local model allows me to learn what works and what doesn't without paying for tokens. Then when I know how not to waste them, I'll try a paid model.

There is one side effect of running your LLM locally: you stop thinking about the token budget. I often run `/goal` with no limits, or script an endless loop in bash to run opencode, etc. Sometimes I just brute force the task by throwing a /goal at it. Maybe it's not the most efficient use either, but it's nice to have the option.

Agreed, I'm waiting for the time when 48GB+ ram is just the standard that computers come with rather than being the absolute top tier option. It just doesn't make sense to spend extra on a local AI computer right now when the same money would last for a decade of API pricing.

Those are all pre-rugpull prices though. Give it a year.

what are you using agentworld for?

My experience also aligns with this. I'm running gemma4 31B on a 4090 through llm.cpp with unsloth models. I also run Qwen 3.6. Qwen is good for thinking and planning as it is faster, but Gemma4's generated code is much higher quality in the first try (Rust, C++ and C#). so it needs less revisions to be at a level I'm comfortable for merging.

I can't Gemma4 to actually finish a turn properly, it's always ending abruptly or making malformed tool calls. It's probably something I've misconfigured in oMLX or Opencode.

Nice. I flip flop between Qwen 3.5 9B Q6_M and Gemma4 12B Q4_K_M on a 4080 Super. They run at about the same speed and I can have them review each other's plan or diffs. For smaller projects I find them very capable, and I can step up to a better quant for slightly more challenging work.

You don't need nearly that much RAM to run Qwen 3.6 27B, though. qwen3.6:27b-q4_K_M is only 17GB, for example.

A 27B model can fit easily on a 32GB VRAM card (e.g. 5090) or a 32GB computer in RAM at FP8/Q8 (unsloth have 28.6GB Q8 files).

For 24GB VRAM cards (e.g. 4090) you can use Q6_K (22.5GB) or Q5_K_M (19.5GB) quants, possibly offloading some of the weights to RAM.

I'm on 128GB ram strix halo, bought framework desktop for a few thousand CAD back when everyone was calling framework desktop overpriced

It wasn't $10k a month ago

I work with a lot of 3D graphics and geo stuff so I can hit the ceiling with my 48 GB mac. It's not all LLM work. I prioritized more storage than RAM with my budget. Being able to run local llms has greatly helped me understand how they work. For day to day dev I pay for Gemini or Claude.

Think commercial. My company invested in a local rig since privacy is important to our customers and sometimes I want to use these models on private data.

Qwen3.6 runs great on GPU with 24GB VRAM. You could get used 3090 for it.

Certainly won't work on my M4 Pro with 24GB lol

Also confused by this. Deepseek V4 flash is so much better than Qwen 3.6 yet cheaper to use.

I've also been running Qwen 3.6 35B A3b on my Windows laptop (64 GB RAM, a 4GB GPU) and it's at least tolerable. It's not fast - a few tokens per second, slower than reading speed - but I can give it a task and come back later. That was a $600 laptop off eBay a few years ago, not a $6,000 machine.

Are these unified memory Macs and giant 24GB desktop GPUs achieving dozens or hundreds of tokens per second commensurate with their 10x-20x cost?

What is the speed on responses? (t/s)

The full 128GB is surely helpful in keeping browsers, editors and other things running since even 20-35GB models + k/v caches can eat up a lot of the core 64GB in my experience.

I know how to build PCs but suck at picking parts, would you happen to have a recommended build or links to people who've done similar ones? Heck I'll click on an affiliate link to support the author of the build :-)

Yes, this should be a monster machine. Ampere is an older generation, so I expect that's where some of your issues have been

Start with a quant, you can run the Qwen 27B model at 4-bit on one 3090, presumably 6/8-bit on 2x3090.

I posted this elsewhere, but Unsloth says the 27B model should run in 18GB. That leaves little RAM for other tasks, but it depends on your tolerance for slowness I suppose. I haven’t tried it in 24GB so report back if you do.

https://unsloth.ai/docs/models/qwen3.6

You might be interested in Ornith 1.0 9B, which is a new intriguing post-training of Qwen 3.5 9B.

Qwen 3.6 27B will run in full offload with a 4-bit quantisation in 64GB on an M1 Max. It is quite slow.

I don't know about 48GB but 64GB should be enough.

Agreed. I have a single 9700 and I'm able to fit Q6 27B at 30tps or Q5 35B at 100tps very easily via llamacpp running vulkan.

The results are impressive considering the amount of people trashing AMD and still trying to recommend 3090s. I hope to buy a 2nd one at some point, but I also hate the version hell of vLLM, the R9700, the ROCM version, and Qwen3.6 all not agreeing with each other. I haven't gotten vLLM to run properly for Qwen3.6, since the version that runs on a 9700 doesn't support 3.6 yet.

I'm trying to quickly hack out a optimized path for just Qwen3.6 to run against rocm natively (e.g. my own inference server for 9700s basically) and see if it can perform better than llamacpp vulkan's results.

Word of caution - the last llamacpp with good performance was b9209 from a month ago. After that, for some reason, vulkan performance dropped by 10x, which has made me lose confidence in llamacpp in the long run.

Having said all that, 3x is 96GB for 4k and peak 900 watts. A 96GB Blackwell is $12k and peak 600 watss. And they will have a similar memory throughput (minor negative to the AMD cards for split processing). It's crazy how price efficient the r9700 is compared to the Nvidia cards.

This is discussed in the article:

"My personal impression is that within these quantizations Qwen 3.6 27B is as good as (or maybe slightly better than) DwarfStar4. Though, I won’t be surprised if for longer context projects DS4 has an edge."

Works beautifully on a 3090, very usable speed. Don't expect Opus 4.8-level performance, but there are some things you just need to keep local.

"DeepSeek-V4-Flash will fit" At Q2, 2bit? Lobotomized to death.

The MoE models hold up better on old hardware, but the dense models like this post promotes are in fact better. This isn't unique to Qwen. Are the dense models better-enough to use given the performance costs? It depends on what you are doing.

If a model runs fast enough for your use case and does exactly what you need it to, then you don't need a much slower model that might be more accurate. If you do anything more complicated, the dense models become more necessary and they are much more computationally heavy by comparison.

On your hardware an Unsloth quant of Gemma 4 26BA4B QAT would likely give you better results, but because it has 4B active parameters instead of Qwen's 3B active parameters, it will probably run slower.

Mind sharing the command line you use to rig it up?

Its so funny, these "toy models" would be the wet dreams of researchers not 5 years ago.

Progress marches without mercy.

Hello, it's the internet calling, today is that day.

https://github.com/ikawrakow/ik_llama.cpp

Edit: it's gonna be slow if you're not using any VRAM. But it's possible. Software isn't going to speed that up anytime soon, it's just a hardware bandwidth limit.

You need it to run in about 8 GB so you have extra space for the context window.

They can be ran on 32GB with 8GB VRAM. I don't think these will be on 16GB for a while. (35B MoE)

It will run (somewhat slowly) on a five year old M1 Max with 64GB RAM.

Personally I prefer the 35B MoE model, which is fast enough to be interactively useful, and capable, but I would probably use the 27B if I wanted to generate whole applications like that.

I am unconvinced that most "local" AI applications need anything much more powerful than the Gemma 4 12B model. Local agentic coding is a small niche, but there are plenty of ways a local model can help with development tasks.

I would really like to see a 12B or 16B Qwen 3.6.

I am currently playing with Ornith 1.0 in the MoE configuration, which is based on the 35B variant of Qwen 3.5; I am not sure if it is better than the 3.6 version.

Benchmarks say it is; my own silly tests either suggest otherwise or suggest that I have to talk to it a bit differently.

> I don't think coding is one

Certainly this is falsifiable easily by any of us doing it on a regular basis

> Qwen stuck in thought loops

This does happen when context is not managed effectively; creating plans, using subagents and compactions strategically resolves this

What harness are you using?

From the perspective of LLM inference, you currently mostly care about:

- Memory bandwidth; BUT the requirements are currently capped because models have stopped growing at around 1-1.5 trillion parameters for quite a while now. You only need more bandwidth if you're optimizing for the highest possible concurrency (i.e. you're a cloud provider). Also, MoE exists.

- Support for native low-precision math (like FP4 and FP8); BUT once your GPU supports native FP4 (Blackwell+), there's generally no reason for GPUs to go lower because of the obvious quality degradation.

- VRAM capacity - just like memory bandwidth, it's practically capped by 1-1.5 trillion parameter models and is unlikely to need much more in the near future. Also, the current trend is toward miniaturization: modern 30B-class models (which require far less VRAM), now completely destroy 200B-class models from just two years ago on most tasks. We also have better understanding now how to compress contexts.

Most model improvements currently seem to come from RL/harness-based methods, not from scaling models or running new algorithms that require fundamentally new GPUs.

So I don't see why GPUs that exist today must become "outdated" in a few years. They'll be seen as outdated by hyperscalers because they need to serve the maximum number of users as cheaply as possible, so of course they'll replace their GPUs with newer ones that have higher memory bandwidth or more tensor cores. But you don't need that for local inference.

3090 was released six years ago and is still very relevant for running models locally.

Qwen 3.6 35B runs on 32GB with a 1080. That GPU is from 2017.

> replace their GPUs faster than they can buy them

How does that work? They have negative GPUs now!

I suspect with those specs, you're not in the game right now for reliably using local models for code generation. The easiest way in is a MacBook with at least 32GB of RAM. This should be able to run a 4bit quantization of qwen 3.6 using the MLX format really well.

I have 8GB VRAM but 32GB RAM. Qwen 3.6 35B runs nicely.

You should look at gemma-4-26B-A4B. 16+8=24gb and Q4 is about 16GB. Not much context left, but might run.

I have 8GB VRAM, but 32GB sys ram. I can run qwen 3.6 35B at 30 tok/s. I also use pi, and it's smart enough to extend itself(multishot and maybe a few tries)

For you, you could try gemma-4-26B-A4B

I think at 16 GB you'd struggle to run the regular development tools nowadays, forget about any interesting inference.

I got a 32GB of RAM and a 6GB VRAM card; tried both 27B and 35B, with pi. And it's a laptop. Speed isn't exactly a concern for me, I can enjoy the real life while the agent is doing its thing. And while they appear smart enough on the first glance, once it reads a file that's more than 100 lines it loses all memory of anything I asked it to do. The lack of failure state or any indication what might be wrong here is just frustrating. Guess local models aren't for me, unless I move to Silicon Valley and redeem my free MacBook at a local Startbucks.

I specifically chose a Mac Studio 128GB as my home server that's also running LLMs to be always online, in part due to the minimal idle power consumption and mostly fan-less operation. It's definitely expensive, especially nowadays, but I can still recommend Mac Minis as a cheaper alternative for someone to just get started with an affordable, always-on home server that won't annoy any housemates. I think both are in some sweet spot in terms of value for money, depending on what you're looking for in a home server. If image or video generation is your thing, look further though, definitely look into a proper GPU then. Macs are quite slow at that. They're just great at MoE LLMs because it's mostly a matter of (V)RAM size.

Generally speaking a home server/workstation set up is going to provide better performance at lower cost. You don't sacrifice much mobility either so long as you have an internet connection and can either SSH tunnel or use Tailscale (never used, just know it's popular).

A decent gaming machine perfectly doubles as your friendly local inference server. Just start llama-server with the model of your choosing and start chatting with it through its Web interface or connect any chat completion-compatible client (agentic or not) which will use REST to send requests and receive responses. From any device on your network. Voila.

Which components are you thinking about?

Curious why OpenCode instead of a more 'full-fat' version of Pi with the larger model?

I feel like the amount of context bloat that OpenCode puts these small models into the dumb zone too quickly. The system prompt alone is 9k tokens, and when you add your own setup it can easily creep up to 15k.

Many people in LocalLLaMA Reddit community has been reporting the same, that 3.5 122B-A10B is on par or slightly better. And a 3.6 or 3.7 od the 122B is one of the models people want to see the most.

Shouldn’t we call them open weight models?

But how will I signal my status to other people then?

On a serious note, I run my models on desktop pc, simple api and i can use them wherever whenever.

Do no give me hope like that.

Are RAM prices down?

I am eagerly waiting!

Qwen 3.7 120B will kill off Antropic’s IPO

Can you link the model? I also have a 24gb card (7900 XTX). I've been having success with the dense 27b model, but I'd like to see if the 35b iq4 is any better.

Whats your example of a "great automation script"?

Nice!

If you want to play a hyperbolic minesweeper, Hyperrogue features that https://hyperrogue.fandom.com/wiki/Minefield

I posted elsewhere but if you have more space try gemma4 31b

You're late to the party, mate; we've been doing this for years. Grab a SearXNG instance, stand up an MCP server for it, and expose the tool into your system prompt. Or use Brave Search. Or Exa if you want to pay. Any of them work. The model will pick it up straight away.

Even llama.cpp's bundled web UI handles it fine. Dead simple.

Searxng is the ghetto solution. Commercial uruky is good. Basically Kagi except you can also run api calls over it

Neither is going to return much knowledge. Basically just relevant url so you need a second tool to grab them and there bot walls get tricky

Working fine with LM Studio + Web search plugin

Llama.cpp uses the GPU very effectively because inference of LLMs is very rudimentary and basically as simple as your GPU memory bandwidth. That's essentially the baseline performance ceiling, with model-specific optimisations like MTP potentially increasing it.

The neural cores aren't suitable for LLMs/transformers and isn't used in LLM inference. On the M5 and later chips, it comes with neural accelerators, aka Tensor Cores, which speed up the 'prefill' (i.e. processing your context window) part, but don't do anything for inference.

The MLX vs GGUF debate is mostly irrelevant. The GGUF pathways are optimised for apple silicon to the extent of practically identical performance to MLX. MLX is just one way of using Apple GPUs, it comes with many optimisations in the box, but they're not hard and they're no longer MLX-exclusive.

ollama is a good starting point

> I honestly don't get the hostility against local models in this thread

Consider that there are literally trillions of dollars being wagered on this not being the future state of computing. Not even speculating that HN is being astroturfed (though I see no reason it wouldn't be by interested parties), but many of the US tech employees here have direct financial incentives in various forms to be rooting for the failure of open source and optionally local models.

works well on pi, but I use a smaller one at higher tok/s for more repetitive tasks

If Qwen is finetuned for a hardness, it'll be Qwen Code. Qwen 27b works well enough in OpenCode though which is what I use. My one complaint is it likes to get cute with bash commands instead of OpenCode's built-in tools. I use a skill to steer that.

> I get hallucinated tool call parameters and bizarre invocations

tweaking sampler might help

If your expectation is to treat it as a coworker, then you're right.

If your expectation is to treat it as a tool, then you're wrong.

I guess that's where the disconnect lies.

You can buy a pair of DGX Sparks and run Deepseek V4 Flash at ~60-70TPS (once DSpark support matures over the next few days).

That will get you a near-frontier experience. DSv4 Flash launched in April with capabilities on par with GLM 5.0, which launched in February.

I really think giving it a year for the hardware market to come back to earth and spending a fraction of that for API access to the same models is a better use of the money.

You care if you run it on a laptop. It's getting hot, fans are spinning, and you may want to use laptop for other things while the agent is working.

AgentWorld is _fantastic_. i just migrated "down" from the 122B A10B qwen model to agentworld (35B A3B) because it feels as capable, easier to steer, and it's 3x faster.

also i like that if i drop more sophisticated tools into my harness (e.g. any of the NLP/RAG-based search tools in place of grep/rg), the agent will actually reach for them and make progress faster; previous models have been reluctant to embrace new tools.

Can you share more? It’s the first I hear of lora outside research papers. Practical applications would be great to see.

Lora if effective could be a great reason to run local models.

skill issue

You might find this helpful. llama is not anywhere near the Pareto distribution (performance vs cost)

https://arena.ai/leaderboard/code/webdev/pareto?license=open...

https://arena.ai/leaderboard/text/pareto?license=open-source

llama 3? Are you from 2023?

Like everybody got 128 GB RAM..