Any reason to upgrade an M2 16GB macbook to a M4 ..GB (or 2026 M5) for local LLMs? Due an upgrade soon and perhaps it is educational to run these things more easily locally?
For LLMs, VRAM is the requirement number one. Since MacBooks have unified RAM you can use up to 75% for the LLM, so a higher RAM model would open more possibilies, but these are much more expensive (of course).
As an alternative you might consider a Ryzen Pro 395+ like in the Framework desktop or HP Zbook G1a but the 128GB versions are still extremely expensive. The Asus Flow Z13 is a tablet with ryzen 395+ but hardly available with 128GB
I did just that , got the r 32gb ram one so I could run qwen.
Might still be early days I’m trying to use the model to sort my local notes but I don’t know man seems only a little faster yet still unusable and I downloaded the lighter qwen model as recommended.
Again it’s early days maybe I’m being an idiot I did manage to get it to parse one note after about 15 mins though.
gpt-oss-20b eats too much ram to use for anything other than an overnight task. maybe 3tok/s.
Been playing around with the 8b versions of qwen and deepseek. Seems usable so far. YMMV, i'm just messing around in chat at the moment, haven't really had it do any tasks for me
sandreas|6 months ago
As an alternative you might consider a Ryzen Pro 395+ like in the Framework desktop or HP Zbook G1a but the 128GB versions are still extremely expensive. The Asus Flow Z13 is a tablet with ryzen 395+ but hardly available with 128GB
ionwake|6 months ago
Might still be early days I’m trying to use the model to sort my local notes but I don’t know man seems only a little faster yet still unusable and I downloaded the lighter qwen model as recommended.
Again it’s early days maybe I’m being an idiot I did manage to get it to parse one note after about 15 mins though.
dpoloncsak|6 months ago
gpt-oss-20b eats too much ram to use for anything other than an overnight task. maybe 3tok/s.
Been playing around with the 8b versions of qwen and deepseek. Seems usable so far. YMMV, i'm just messing around in chat at the moment, haven't really had it do any tasks for me