Comment by moosedev

You're correct, the base (non-Pro, non-Max) chips are still not great for local LLMs. M5 and M6 both improved prefill speed/time-to-first-token over prior gens, but bw is still a bottleneck.

There's rumored to be no M6 Pro or M6 Max coming, i.e. the higher bandwidth chips will skip a gen. M7 is also rumored to have better memory bandwidth across the range.