It’s hot and also LOUD and runs the battery down quick.
But I’m having a lot of luck just running things when I’m away from the computer and can leave it plugged in.
It starts going weird (unreliable and slow) with context over 80k so you have to pick tasks one at a time and baby sit a lot more than Claude. But it really is very capable and feels like there’s an intelligence there to talk to. Maybe gpt-4 level clever?
I have an m5 max 64gb and I think anything slower would be quite painful.
I tried it on my M1 MacBook Pro. It's slow but surprisingly smart as a general purpose LLM. Maybe GPT-5.3 level. I gave it a bunch of tools and it can search the internet, make product recommendations, document, code, etc.
Does it need to respond fast? For important applications, I'm sure we'd all be fine waiting 20 minutes for a high quality, usable answer. Or is it the need for interative refinements that make speed relevant?
It requires patience but it’s more like waiting 5 mins for it to do tasks. You need to be much more involved though and do things slower than Claude where you can trust it to do a lot of tasks at once. It doesn’t have the context for that
I just got qwen 3.8 27b mlx running on my Macbook Pro and honestly I’m pretty blown away by how not-dumb it is.
My problem is how hot they run. I'm on an m4 pro. Do you have the same issue?
It’s hot and also LOUD and runs the battery down quick.
But I’m having a lot of luck just running things when I’m away from the computer and can leave it plugged in.
It starts going weird (unreliable and slow) with context over 80k so you have to pick tasks one at a time and baby sit a lot more than Claude. But it really is very capable and feels like there’s an intelligence there to talk to. Maybe gpt-4 level clever?
I have an m5 max 64gb and I think anything slower would be quite painful.
Someone just mentioned how fast they were burning tokens. I thought it was a metaphor.
I don't have the hardware but a often mentioned advice is to put your mac into energy saving mode - it still will work, a bit slower, but stays cool.
Mineral oil bath?
Or, set it up in another room, and connect from the other laptop.
How many tok/s are you getting? What gen mbp?
how quick does it respond? what are specs of your laptop?
I tried it on my M1 MacBook Pro. It's slow but surprisingly smart as a general purpose LLM. Maybe GPT-5.3 level. I gave it a bunch of tools and it can search the internet, make product recommendations, document, code, etc.
Does it need to respond fast? For important applications, I'm sure we'd all be fine waiting 20 minutes for a high quality, usable answer. Or is it the need for interative refinements that make speed relevant?
It requires patience but it’s more like waiting 5 mins for it to do tasks. You need to be much more involved though and do things slower than Claude where you can trust it to do a lot of tasks at once. It doesn’t have the context for that
Did you read even the title?