I still have the air with whatever the macos is, but as soon as i have a minute i'm going to try and get linux or BSD on it. I'm still sore at how little use i got out of that machine - and i got it "open box" "scratch and dent", so it was around $500 with tax. I got triple the usage out of a 2009ish eeePC (netbook)
So sad this kind of shenanigans are not possible anymore.
It didn't look like a good candidate for OpenCore Legacy because of the dual video cards, but it feels so gross recycling a perfectly working computer.
I find that a lot of my work is "remote" at this point. Im doing most things on Servers, VM's, and containers on other boxes. The few apps that I do run locally are suffering (browser being the big offender).
Is most of what you're doing remote? Do you have a decent amount of ram in that air?
I suspect that people who have somewhat older Macs (obviously there's some limit) who find their web browsing intolerably slow probably have something else going on with either their install or their network.
This makes me call into question literally everything else in your post.
You might be able to do CPU based for a few trials for fun, but you arent running LLMs on CPU on a daily basis.
The relatively little LLM use I do is in a browser and it doesn't matter which computer I'm doing it on.
What do I mean?
In game development, people often argue that game consoles hold back PC games. This is true to a point, because more time is spent optimising at the cost of features, but also optimising for consoles means PC players are reaping the benefits of a baseline decent performance even on low end hardware.
Right now I am developing a game for PC and my dev team are happy to set system requirements at an 11th generation i7 and a 40-series (4070 or higher) graphics card. Obviously that makes our target demographic very narrow but from their perspective the game runs: so why would I be upset?
For over a decade memory was so cheap that most people ended up maxing out their systems, the result is that every program is electron.
For the last 10 years memory started to be constrained and suddenly a lot of electron became less shitty (its still shitty) and memory requirements were something that you could tell at least some companies started working to reduce (or at least not increase).
Now we get faster CPUs, the constraint is gone, and since the M-series chips came out I am certain that software that used to be useful on intel macs is becoming slower and slower. Especially the electron stuff which seems to especially perform well on M-chips