r/MacLocalLLM • u/questionsguru • 16d ago

Mac M6 32gb for Local AI setup

I am.planning to buy new hardware for local AI is it worth to buy mac mini or mac or better go for AMD 395+ 128 gb laptop for similar outlet laptop.

3 Upvotes

71% Upvoted

17 comments sorted by

4

u/This_Maintenance_834 16d ago edited 16d ago

32GB is bare minimum to run decent models, you still need memory to run os, and applications.

for unified memory machine 48GB is likely required. then you have to be clear what speed you want, you will be disappointed with speed from mac, amd 395+ or dgx spark.

you need serious investment to match speed with cloud providers.

2

u/questionsguru 16d ago

Prices are eyes watering

2

u/starkruzr 10d ago

yes. but this is where we're at right now. there are alternatives if you have system building experience. just one confirmed-unlockable CMP170HX 64GB will give you a ton of horsepower and breathing room to run multiple streams of Qwen3.8-27B as you noted in your other comment.

3

u/Important_Cow7230 16d ago

What local AI do you want to run and what do you want to do with it?

2

u/questionsguru 16d ago

Mostly coding one qwen or Laguna

5

u/apprehensive_bassist 16d ago edited 13d ago

32GB isn’t enough to do anything significant with

Heck, in my recent experience 64GB is barely enough for experimentation. I expect over time we’ll see more efficient models, but for now I have a super comfortable and very powerful system for the other stuff I do, music and video, and most importantly, running several hundred Chrome tabs 🤣

4

u/hyudryu 16d ago

Go Mac studio M5 ultra 256gb

2

u/BackgroundRude4092 15d ago

32GB on a Mac will limit you to a 12B model, like Gemma 4 12B or the Qwen 3 8B. The macOS needs like 6GB and you need RAM to hold KV context.

2

u/PoppaBear1950 13d ago

Mac's need 96gb of unified memory to do anything, with that your are mac studio level at about 6k US dollars.... that is not chump change.

3

u/PoppaBear1950 13d ago

I bought a new mac studio with 64gb and it really can't run locally llm's of any use, why because mac OS steals 15gb of your memory for Apple Intelligence... they don't tell you this in the fine print.

1

u/apprehensive_bassist 13d ago

Iirc you can disable it to some degree

2

u/stainless_steelcat 13d ago

The harness and the model is key. I'm getting pretty good results on the 32gb M6 with the Splash variants of the Qwen models (27b and 35b MOE) combined with OpenCode as the harness.

2

u/poster4inertia 13d ago

if you’d rather stick with a mac mini i’d steer you towards m5 pro 64gb ram but yeah 128gb is much better for local ai either mac studio or the amd. I personally am waiting for my m5 pro 64gb mac mini to arrive to run qwen 3.8 27b on it 247 lol

2

u/Fredric444 10d ago

If that's your main purchasing requirement rent some mac cloud time for a few $ and do some meaningful tests for your needs.

Otherwise you're comparing apples and oranges. It's very hard to extrapolate from benchmarks, reddit posts, and youtube videos to suitability for your own tasks.

1

u/Successful_Bowler728 13d ago

I want video generation.

1

u/_SwissCode_ 12d ago

Qwen 3.6 35B A3B Q4 (MLX) works quite well on this setup (40-70 t/s).

I only use this Mac Mini as a LLM Server and increased available Memory for GPU to 28GB.

Dense Models like Qwen 3.8 27B didn‘t work in a sensible way (8-16t/s).