alt Hacker NewsI 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 agents.
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. Connect to it over LAN or Tailscale. The MacMini will also cost you almost 1/3 of the MacBook Pro.
Thank me later.
Replies
What kind of speed in tk/s do you get with the MacBook?
You could use an external keyboard?
Are you sure you're running it with MLX?
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.
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.
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>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.
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.