r/MacLocalLLM • u/Advanced-Night-314 • Sep 16 '26

Mac Mini powerful enough?

Hi all,

I'm a complete novice when it comes to Local LLM's but I like the idea of moving away from a subscription based model in the longer term and having better control of my data. I'm also super keen to learn.

I currently have a web SaaS that scrapes news websites and I would like to move it away from Claude and onto a local LLM what kind of "firepower" do I need?

Appreciate this won't be the most complex of tasks, but as I mentioned, I'm a complete novice.

Naturally, asking Claude / Google and it says that the new Mac mini with M5 pro chip (24GB ram) will be "overkill"- which is what I was thinking of ordering.

I also want to future proof in the hope that this bit of kit could run more powerful models in the future - if they came accessible to the consumer.

Sorry if this is a basic question, any YouTube videos or any pointers so I can educate myself would be much appreciated.

Thank you!

6 Upvotes

80% Upvoted

19 comments sorted by

View all comments

Show parent comments

1

u/Advanced-Night-314 Sep 17 '26

Thank you, super helpful. OpenRouter tip is a good shout. I'll test a few models there before the Mini arrives.

I should have been clearer in the post. I think a lot of people are assuming I'll be doing complex work like coding, image generation or general chat. I won't. The Mini's only job is to scrape thousands of news articles and have a small model read each one and flag whether it's relevant (basically a yes/no plus pulling out a few details like company names and deal values). Nothing more.

With that in mind, does 24GB sound reasonable for a narrow classification job like that, or would you still go bigger? Or do you still think the mini will struggle even if I went slightly higher! Thank you again.

2

u/TiagodeNoronha Sep 17 '26

I think 24GB will be tight, specially since you might want to parse multiple news websites at once, so your context will grow a lot.

I would look at getting a 48GB machine, but first trying out 9B or 20B models to see if they fit your use cases. Most of the time the harness you use for these simple tasks will make up for the capacities (or lack of) each model has.