M5
Best Apple M5 Pro and Max for Local AI (2026)
M5 Pro at 307GB/s, M5 Max at 614GB/s (or 460 on the 32-core bin), up to 128GB — now the highest-memory Mac you can buy. Picks for Qwen 3.6 and Llama 3.3 70B.
Best Local LLMs for Mac in 2026 — M1 through M5 Tested
Best model for every Mac tier, 8GB to the 96GB Studio ceiling. Qwen 3.6, Llama 4 Scout, DeepSeek V4, MLX vs Ollama. Why bandwidth, not RAM, sets your speed.
Run LLMs on Mac M-Series: Faster, Without the Gotchas (2026)
Foundational how-to for Apple Silicon local AI: unified memory, MLX vs Ollama vs llama.cpp Metal, verification, and the headless Mac Mini AI server.
Best VRAM Cheat Sheet for Local LLMs: Every Model, Every Quant
Exact VRAM for Qwen 3.6, Qwen 3.5, Llama, Mistral, and DeepSeek at Q3 through FP16. Lookup tables for 7B, 9B, 13B, 27B, 32B, 70B, and 120B models with real measurements and GPU recommendations. Updated July 2026.