Comment by jtbaker
11 hours ago
having a 64GB mac mini m4 pro the last few years with some increasingly capable usefulness has kept me interested in this stuff in a way that using a paid platform wouldn't have. Similar to running K8s in a homelab, something about interacting with the hardware makes it more engaging/interesting, for me at least.
In general, I'm a big believer in doing more with fewer resources, within reason, and think having local setups really helps me be mindful with what's happening under the hood with these systems and managing context efficiently to get high quality results.
I guess it depends on what you're trying to do. I've run a few LLMs on my 64gig Mac but anything image or video related is ridiculously slow compared to even old NVidia on my PC.
Have you been using an MTP setup? I've been having pretty good luck with the Qwen models with the built in MTP heads via https://mtplx.com at around Q4. My main driver rig is an M5 Max MBP work got for me a few weeks ago. Hitting 1000-1200 TPS prefill on Qwen 3.8-Flash-Next there.