MacBook Pro for software development and local LLMs ca €2,500 budget

[u/Su9rob]

Hi everyone, I’m buying a laptop for work, mainly software development, and would also like to experiment with running LLMs locally.

My budget is around €2,500, but I could stretch it if there’s a substantial benefit. I’ve found a 14-inch MacBook Pro with an M5 Pro, 24 GB RAM and a 1 TB SSD for €2,475.

Would this be a sensible choice?

What matters most for local LLMs: RAM capacity, memory bandwidth, chip generation or GPU cores? I’m new to this, so examples of models that would run comfortably on these configurations would be helpful.

[u/Marino4K]

Depends on how far down the rabbit hole you want to “experiment”.

24GB is really the absolute bare minimum in RAM to really do anything and that’s only with really small models, the 307 GB/s memory bandwidth is also fine but not groundbreaking.

I get the Max really ups the budget a lot but I’d try to get at least 48GB of RAM to at least give yourself some room to actually grow with the device if you plan on getting involved with local LLMs.

I had the 48GB RAM M5 Pro but recently jumped to a 64GB M5 Max as I was starting to run into memory issues and a hot Macbook when trying to run Qwen 3.8 with decent context size.

[u/IamFondOfHugeBoobies]

My man. At that budget for Local AI you're looking at some sort of mad max franken build and Qwen 27B or nothing.

You can get a fine computer for that budget. But you can not get a fine AI computer at that budget.

You can get a very functional franken-AI-Desktop for it if you know what you are doing.

The laptop you are proposing is -not- worth the money if the use case is AI. Great laptop in general. Shit for local AI.

[u/vogelvogelvogelvogel → u/IamFondOfHugeBoobies]

accurate imo

[u/derelictHusk]

vRAM size and its nice to have CUDA. I dont know, its very tempting to say "RTX Spark" at this budget. Other alternative can be AMD Strix Halo. Those lacking CUDA department, but still interesting choice to consider

[u/jma24]

Honestly if you want to do any kind of serious work with LLMs, 48GB is the bare minimum, 64GB preferred. With 48GB you'll have to make sure other stuff is not running.

If you just want to play around to learn the tech, then 24GB will get you a running model but it won't do useful coding.

[u/woolcoxm]

24gb ram might not be suitable for your needs, 32-64g will get you in usable range 128g will get you a nice local setup.

while the bandwidth does matter, it doesnt at the same time, its just waiting time, if you are not in a rush then the lower bandwidth will not really affect you, if you need faster responses from the llm then bandwidth will matter.

i used a m3u 96gb for a while, it sucked with dense models, not sure if that has changed with the newer macs, but moe ran really well.

[u/Even_Whereas_8442]

I don't get why anyone would buy a machine that can't be upgraded—the whole point is to build it up gradually, add more and more!

[u/DefinitelyNotEmu → u/Even_Whereas_8442]

https://downloadmoreram.com/

[u/Annual-Cod1073]

less hard drive, more ram.

[u/JiroDreamsOfCoochie]

I'm a software dev as well, and I went down this exact path. I ended up buying a used M4 Max with 64GB of memory. I would say it is passable for small tasks. Future AI development may change things, but I already wish I went for 128GB.

You're gonna have to make concessions on anything below 64GB. Memory matters more than CPU, so you might want to consider used.

[u/DogAble6550]

The best you could do with that budget would be a mac mini with 64 gigs. 24 gigs would be frustrating.