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Comment by Terretta | Hacker News Reader

If your job or hobby in any way likes LLMs, and you like to "Work Anywhere", it's hard not to justify the MBP Max (e.g. M3 Max, now M4 Max) with 128GB. You can run more than you'd think, faster than you'd think.

See also Hugging Face's MLX community:

https://huggingface.co/mlx-community

QwQ 32B is featured:

https://huggingface.co/collections/mlx-community/qwq-32b-pre...

If you want a traditional GUI, LM Studio beta 0.3.x is iterating on MLX: https://lmstudio.ai/beta-releases

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For that price you could get some beefy Nvidia GPUs or a lot of cloud credits, but the unified memory and nice laptop are a real bonus.

I've been off Mac's for ten years since OSX started driving me crazy, but I've been strongly considering picking up the latest Mac Mini as a poor man's version of what you're talking about. For €1k you can get an M4 with 32GiB of unified ram, of an M4 pro with 64GiB for €2k which is a bit more affordable.

If you shucked the cheap ones into your rack you could have a very hefty little Beowulf cluster for the price of that MBP.

4699$US. Quickest justification I ever made not to buy something

To add to that, given the wild trajectory of the field, it's at the very least doubtful, that that's going to buy you access to hardware (let alone: a model) that's still even remotely desirable for relevant AI use, even a year from now.

But it has the logo I’ve been told to buy, so regardless of the quality or specs I need to buy it, how else will I ever show my face in Zoom meetings to my SoCal colleagues?

Yeah, exactly. If you don't want a discrete GPU of your own in a desktop that you could technically access remotely, then go with cloud GPU.

Why pay Apple silly money for their ram when you could take that same money, get a MB Air and build a desktop with a 4090 in it (hell, if you already have the desktop you could buy TWO 4090s for that money). Then just set up the server to use remotely.

> why

offline. anywhere.

separately, if you purchase anything from Dell to Framework, you quickly learn there's no "apple tax", there's a cost for a type of engineering to a given spec (for oranges to oranges "TCO" you should spec all the things, including screen, energy, and resale value), and it's comparable from any manufacture, with the Apple resale value dropping their TCO lower than the others.

Yeah I suppose if you wanna hike up a mountain & still be able to use a full sized model then, yeah. But be my guest, I ain't doing that any time soon!

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