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Just ordered a $12k mac studio w/ 512GB of integrated RAM. Can't wait for it to arrive and crank up LM Studio. It's literally the first install. I'm going to d
by chisleu 1y ago
Just ordered a $12k mac studio w/ 512GB of integrated RAM.
Can't wait for it to arrive and crank up LM Studio. It's literally the first install. I'm going to download it with safari.
LM Studio is newish, and it's not a perfect interface yet, but it's fantastic at what it does which is bring local LLMs to the masses w/o them having to know much.
There is another project that people should be aware of:
https://github.com/exo-explore/exo https://github.com/exo-explore/exo
Exo is this radically cool tool that automatically clusters all hosts on your network running Exo and uses their combined GPUs for increased throughput.
Like HPC environments, you are going to need ultra fast interconnects, but it's just IP based.
- karmakaze 1y agoNice. Ironically well suited for non-Apple Intelligence.
- dchest 1y agoI'm using it on MacBook Air M1 / 8 GB RAM with Qwen3-4B to generate summaries and tags for my vibe-coded Bloomberg Terminal-style RSS reader :-) It works fine (the laptop gets hot and slow, but fine). Probably should just use llama.cpp server/ollama and not waste a gig of memory on Electron, but I like GUIs.
- minimaxir 1y ago8 GB of RAM with local LLMs in general is iffy: a 8-bit quantized Qwen3-4B is 4.2GB on disk and likely more in memory. 16 GB is usually the minimum to be able to run decent models without compromising on heavy quantization.
- hnuser123456 1y agoBut 8GB of Apple RAM is 16GB of normal RAM. https://www.pcgamer.com/apple-vp-says-8gb-ram-on-a-macbook-pro-analogous-to-16gb-ram-on-a-pc-we-just-happen-to-be-able-to-use-it-much-more-efficiently/ https://www.pcgamer.com/apple-vp-says-8gb-ram-on-a-macbook-p...
- arrty88 1y agoI concur. I just upgraded from m1 air with 8gb to m4 with 24gb. Excited to run bigger models.
- diggan 1y ago> m4 with 24gb Wow, that is probably analogous to 48GB on other systems then, if we were to ask an Apple VP?
- vntok 1y agoNot sure what Apple VPs have to do with the tech but yeah, pretty much any core engineer you ask at Apple will tell you this. Here is a nice article with some info about what memory compression is and how it works: https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2013/10/os-x-10-9/#page-17 https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2013/10/os-x-10-9/#page-17 It's been a hard technical problem but is pretty much solved by now since its first debut in 2012-2013.
- pxc 1y agoI've heard good things about how macOS handles memory relative to other operating systems. But Linux and Windows both have memory compression nowadays. So the claim is then not that memory compression makes your RAM twice as effective, but that macOS' memory compression is twice as good as the real and existing memory compression available on other operating systems. Doesn't such a claim... need stronger evidence?
- minimaxir 1y agoInterestingly it was AI (Apple Intelligence) that was the primary reason Apple abandoned that hedge.
- dchest 1y agoIt's 4-bit quantized (Q4_K_M, 2.5 GB) and still works well for this task. It's amazing. I've been running various small models on this 8 GB Air since the first Llama and GPT-J, and they improved so much! macOS virtual memory works well on swapping in and out stuff to SSD.
- incognito124 1y ago> I'm going to download it with Safari Oof you were NOT joking
- noman-land 1y agoSafari to download LM Studio. LM Studio to download models. Models to download Firefox.
- teaearlgraycold 1y agoThe modern ninite
- sneak 1y agoI already got one of these. I’m spoiled by Claude 4 Opus; local LLMs are slower and lower quality. I haven’t been using it much. All it has on it is LM Studio, Ollama, and Stats.app. > Can't wait for it to arrive and crank up LM Studio. It's literally the first install. I'm going to download it with safari. lol, yup. same.
- chisleu 1y agoYup, I'm spoiled by Claude 3.7 Sonnet right now. I had to stop using opus for plan mode in my Agent because it is just so expensive. I'm using Gemini 2.5 pro for that now. I'm considering ordering one of these today: https://www.newegg.com/p/N82E16816139451?Item=N82E16816139451&SoldByNewegg=1 https://www.newegg.com/p/N82E16816139451?Item=N82E1681613945... It looks like it will hold 5 GPUs with a single slot open for infiniband Then local models might be lower quality, but it won't be slow! :)
- kristopolous 1y agoThe GPUs are the hard things to find unless you want to pay like 50% markup
- sneak 1y agoThat’s just what they cost; MSRP is irrelevant. They’re not hard to find, they’re just expensive.
- evo_9 1y agoI was using Claude 3.7 exclusively for coding, but it sure seems like it got worse suddenly about 2–3 weeks back. It went from writing pretty solid code I had to make only minor changes to, to being completely off its rails, altering files unrelated to my prompt, undoing fixes from the same conversation, reinventing db access and ignoring existing coding 'standards' established in the existing codebase. Became so untrustworthy I finally gave OpenAi O3 a try and honestly, I was pretty surprised how solid it has been. I've been using o3 since, and I find it generally does exactly what I ask, esp if you have a well established project with plenty of code for it to reference. Just wondering if Claude 3.7 has seemed differently lately for anyone else? Was my go to for several months, and I'm no fan of OpenAI, but o3 has been rock solid.
- teaearlgraycold 1y agoWhat are you going to do with the LLMs you run?
- chisleu 1y agoCurrently I'm using gemini 2.5 and claude 3.7 sonnet for coding tasks. I'm interested in using models for code generation, but I'm not expecting much in that regard. I'm planning to attempt fine tuning open source models on certain tool sets, especially MCP tools.
- prettyblocks 1y agoI've been using openwebui and am pretty happy with it. Why do you like lm studio more?
- truemotive 1y agoOpen WebUI can leverage the built in web server in LM Studio, just FYI in case you thought it was primarily a chat interface.
- prophesi 1y agoNot OP, but with LM Studio I get a chat interface out-of-the-box for local models, while with openwebui I'd need to configure it to point to an OpenAI API-compatible server (like LM Studio). It can also help determine which models will work well with your hardware. LM Studio isn't FOSS though. I did enjoy hooking up OpenWebUI to Firefox's experimental AI Chatbot. (browser.ml.chat.hideLocalhost to false, browser.ml.chat.provider to localhost:${openwebui-port})
- s1mplicissimus 1y agoi recently tried openwebui but it was so painful to get it to run with local model. that "first run experience" of lm studio is pretty fire in comparison. can't really talk about actually working with it though, still waiting for the 8GB download
- prettyblocks 1y agoInteresting. I run my local llms through ollama and it's zero trouble to get that working in openwebui as long as the ollama server is running.
- diggan 1y agoI think that's the thing. Compared to LM Studio, just running Ollama (fiddling around with terminals) is more complicated than the full E2E of chatting with LM Studio. Of course, for folks used to terminals, daemons and so on it makes sense from the get go, but for others it seemingly doesn't, and it doesn't help that Ollama refuses to communicate what people should understand before trying to use it.
- noman-land 1y agoI love LM Studio. It's a great tool. I'm waiting for another generation of Macbook Pros to do as you did :).
- imranq 1y agoI'd love to host my own LLMs but I keep getting held back from the quality and affordability of Cloud LLMs. Why go local unless there's private data involved?
- mycall 1y agoOffline is another use case.
- seanmcdirmid 1y agoNothing like playing around with LLMs on an airplane without an internet connection.
- asteroidburger 1y agoIf I can afford a seat above economy with room to actually, comfortably work on a laptop, I can afford the couple bucks for wifi for the flight.
- seanmcdirmid 1y agoIf you are assuming that your Hainan airlines flight has wifi that isn't behind the GFW, even outside of cattle class, I have some news for you...
- sach1 1y agoGetting around the GFW is trivially easy.
- seanmcdirmid 1y agoya ya, just buy a VPN, pay the yearly subscription, and then have them disappear the week after you paid. Super trivially frustrating.
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- zackify 1y agoI love LM studio but I’d never waste 12k like that. The memory bandwidth is too low trust me. Get the RTX Pro 6000 for 8.5k with double the bandwidth. It will be way better
- marci 1y agoYou can't run deepseek-v3/r1 on the RTX Pro 6000, not to mention the upcomming 1 million context qwen models, or the current qwen3-235b.
- 112233 1y agoI can run full deepseek r1 on m1 max with 64GB of ram. Around 0.5 t/s with small quant. Q4 quant of Maverick (253 GB) runs at 2.3 t/s on it (no GPU offload). Practically, last gen or even ES/QS EPYC or Xeon (with AMX), enough RAM to fill all 8 or 12 channels plus fast storage (4 Gen5 NVMEs are almost 60 GB/s) on paper at least look like cheapest way to run these huge MoE models at hobbyist speeds.
- marci 1y agoIf you're talking about Deepseek r1 with llama.cpp and mmap, then at this point you can run deepseek r1 on a raspberry zero with a 256GB micro sdcard and a phone charger. The only metric left to know is one's patience.
- tymscar 1y agoWhy would they pay 2/3 of the price for something with 1/5 of ram? The whole point of spending that much money for them is to run massive models, like the full R1, which the Pro 6000 cant
- zackify 1y agoBecause waiting forever for initial prompt processing with realistic number of MCP tools enabled on a prompt is going to suck without the most bandwidth possible And you are never going to sit around waiting for anything larger than the 96+gb of ram that the RTX pro has. If you’re using it for background tasks and not coding it’s a different story
- tt726259 1y ago[dead]
- wangbang 1y ago[dead]
- storus 1y agoIf the rumors about splitting CPU/GPU in new Macs are true, your MacStudio will be the last one capable of running DeepSeek R1 671B Q4. It looks like Apple had an accidental winner that will go away with the end of unified RAM.
- phren0logy 1y agoI have not heard this rumor. Source?
- prophesi 1y agoI believe they're talking about the rumors by an Apple supply chain analyst, Ming-Chi Kuo. https://www.techspot.com/news/106159-apple-m5-silicon-rumored-ditch-unified-memory-split.html https://www.techspot.com/news/106159-apple-m5-silicon-rumore...
- diggan 1y agoSeems Apple is waking up to the fact that if it's too easy to run weights locally, there really isn't much sense to having their own remote inference endpoints, so time to stop the party :)
- prophesi 1y agoI thought their goal was to completely remove the need for a remote inference endpoint in the first place? May have read your comment wrong.
- diggan 1y agoNo, I think Apple been clear from the beginning that they won't be able to do everything on the devices themselves, that's why they're building the infrastructure/software for their "cloud intelligence system" or whatever they call it.
- whatevsmate 1y agoI did this a month ago and don't regret it one bit. I had a long laundry list of ML "stuff" I wanted to play with or questions to answer. There's no world in which I'm paying by the request, or token, or whatever, for hacking on fun projects. Keeping an eye on the meter is the opposite of having fun and I have absolutely nowhere I can put a loud, hot GPU (that probably has "gamer" lighting no less) in my fam's small apartment.
- chisleu 1y agoRight on. I also have a laundry list of ML things I want to do starting with fine tuning models. I don't mind paying for models to do things like code. I like to move really fast when I'm coding. But for other things, I just didn't want to spend a week or two coming up on the hardware needed to build a GPU system. You can just order a big GPU box, but it's going to cost you astronomically right now. Building a system with 4-5 PCIE 5.0 x16 slots, enough power, enough pcie lanes... It's a lot to learn. You can't go on PC part picker and just hunt a motherboard with 6 double slots. This is a machine to let me do some things with local models. My first goal is to run some quantized version of the new V3 model and try to use it for coding tasks. I expect it will be slow for sure, but I just want to know what it's capable of.
- datpuz 1y agoI genuinely cannot wrap my head around spending this much money on hardware that is dramatically inferior to hardware that costs half the price. MacOS is not even great anymore, they stopped improving their UX like a decade ago.
- chisleu 1y agoHow can you say something so brave, and so wrong?