My M4 Pro 48GB gets about 13tok/s, in both 3.6 and 3.8 27b Qwens. Qwen A3B and Gemma get closer to 100tok/s from memory but the results are pretty poor for coding tasks.
Edited to add: for agentic workflow I’m running omlx which tells me it has about a 90% cache hit rate (tradeoff is some disk and mem space) - that noticeably changes the felt speed.
I feel like it's 50/50 between people doing that, and people that have spent a lot of time tuning a system they are pointing at focused and well specified problems.
Seems threads about local LLMs on Apple hardware feature comments listing M3/4/5 at 48GB 64GB and not 128GB.
That is, users with M-series hardware that have less-than-max RAM share results whereas users with max RAM do not.
Speculating (not extrapolating), maybe users with machine that have max RAM are less interested in running local LLMs and are less averse to paying services for compute?
Personally, I’d love to see what output max RAM M-series Apple hardware in these threads.
Qwen3.8-27B runs at 59.5 tok/s on my M4 Max, 40-core GPU, 128 GB
I use it occasionally for classification and other tasks but I wouldn't trust those smaller models with the real work and for larger data processing it's too slow, e.g. a dataset I wanted to classify would've taken 56 days on my laptop vs just paying the cheap Luna prices to openai and getting it done in a few hours.
I've been using Qwen3.6-37B-A3B on an M1 Max w/ llama.cpp and for my practical uses I prefer it to qwen3.8. When 3.8 does answer its slower and, qualitatively, marginally better than qwen3.6, but 3.8 often ends up in unresolved thought loops and runs slower. The Moe 3.6 on my setup is much faster, 500t/s peaks, 30t/s typical, vs 3.8 150 peak, 4-9 t/s typical.
While I've spend a little time tuning, I'm assuming there will be deeper tuning for 3.8 that might close the gap.
Yeah, that's my experience. It's a big "wow" factor to get a non-trivial LLM running on my Mac, but it's actually not that useful. Like trying to use Photoshop at 8 FPS.
It’s not because you didn’t find use cases for local LLMs that there are none.
I use local LLMs on my Mac Mini M4 Pro with 48G to review text messages tone, act as a text correction tool, act as a code review tool, to do code agent work, generate code snippets, etc
Regarding this analogy, fps don't matter as much for Photoshop, since it's not an immediate mode GUI. 8 fps would be quite ok for comfortably getting feedback on live image filters and such.
