[fellowniusmonk]

First rule of mac world is get the most memory you can afford.

I got the cheapest m1 pro (the weird one they sold thats binned due to defects) with 32gb ram and everything runs awesome.

Always get the most ram you can in mac world. Running a largish local LLM model is slowish but it does run.

A mac out of memory is just a totally different machine than one with.

probably because most of the devs building the software are on the highest ram possible and there is just so much testing and optimization they dont do.

[Casteil]

Part of me misses my OG base 14" M4 Pro. The battery on that thing was absolutely phenomenal - literal 12-14+ hours of real-world use. Not so much on the 14" M1 Max (64GB) that I upgraded to after about 2 yrs.

'Real-world idle' efficiency on the newer chips is the main reason I've got the (slight) itch to upgrade, but 64GB+ MBPs certainly don't come cheap.

[willis936]

Which is crazy because I recently moved to an M1 pro and the idle battery was at least twice as good as any windows x86 machine I've ever used.

[ed_mercer]

IIRC on macbooks, memory is actually not that important because of the insanely fast SSD and swap. Though LLMs are probably a different story