MacBook Pro and local LLM

[al404]

I own a MacBook Air M3 16Gb 15" and really like it except for local LLM
I mostly use Claude Code but since AI market is unpredictable I was looking into LM studio

Air is not the right machine to run local LLM it get gets hot quite fast

I was wondering if a MacBook PRO M5 32Gb could be good enough to run some decent model
I actually prefer the 15" air size and I guess I would have to downgrade to 14"

Not sure if is I should wait and see how Cloud AI will evolve or upgrade know to something that let me have a local option

 

[Bigwaff]

Local LLM for what use cases?

 

[al404]

Text and coding I'm just starting to mess a round with them on my Mac mini M4 24Gb and I see I can run Gemma 4 26B, Qwen3.5-27B-Claude-4.6-Opus ( but is slow), GPT oss 20b

Is pretty hard to understand how good they are but from what I'm reading Gemma 4 seems pretty smart for his RAM occupation

 

[splifingate]

Qwen3.5-27B

Using this model can bump one of my GPUs with 32GB of dedicated VRAM in linux to a full 300W...that's going to be a challenge for any laptop.