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Comment by minimaxir

10 hours ago

I've had my eye on the normal Mac Studio M5 Ultra (normal plebeian 96GB RAM) and the release (edit: ship) date there keeps slipping, now into January. I'm surprised Apple is pushing the backlog even more.

I have one. It can run lots of smaller models really well. I’ve been loving Gemma4 especially. My needs more more large scale information extraction and not trying to replace Claude code locally though.

If anything the interesting models that can run in about 64gb of memory are increasing because most people can’t access more memory than that. I’m especially excited for clef and cleric as they continue to improve. Yeah, you don’t get 1mil token context length, but even frontier models can lose focus at that level

  • I've been holding off because I will need to do experimentation with local models at some point...but not yet and won't be for a bit but I am afraid prices will rise given component cost trajectories.

    I've been tempted to just get the M5 Max instead and just innovate with smaller models myself.