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Comment by ActorNightly | Hacker News Reader

>If you want to run Qwen3.6 27B / 35B at its best, get a MacMini M4 with 64GB of RAM and put it in the basement

Im sorry, but its time to start calling Apple sycophants out. Stop trying to push your tech jewelry on other people. You only buy those computers because they are Apple, you don't know anything about computing or running LLMs, you don't do any real work, so you should probably not give advice on what to buy.

A single 3090 will run Qwen3.6 27b fine, and its VRAM speed is twice of what the best Mac has. And the build will be cheaper. Decent CPU/Motherboard, 32gb of DDR4 ram, an SSD and a Single 3090 should run max about $4grand. Mac m4 mini is 6grand.

Then, when gpu prices come down (or you find one on a deal), you can upgrade the card, or stick a second one, and benefit from more speed. You can't do that with the trash Apple produces.

Flag me if you want, I don't care. Its embarrasing for the tech community to give advice this bad.

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I am not going to flag you, I am much OK with having good arguments.

I just purchased a Mac Mini M4 Pro 64GB for $3k - 2nd hand of course.

I am not a hater of Nvidia and I am planning on building a workstation based on RTX cards. You clearly do not seem to understand how convenient the MacMini actually IS - the form factor, how quiet it is, how durable it is, how well it integrates with other Macs, how well it works as a bridge to a personal agent like Hermes (integration with iMessage, Calendar, Reminders, iCloud, etc).

I am pretty sure I know a thing or two about computing, I have been in the trenches for many, many years and I have had machines of all kinds, shapes and colors. It just so happens that Macs are very capable, very convenient machines that happen to work great in the era of LLMs, too.

But you do you.

If you are in Apple ecosystem, and have reasons to own one besides inference, then buying a used Mac mini pro isn’t such a bad idea. I just bought a regular Mac mini just to provide a nice front end to my Ubuntu workstation. But if all you want is inference, then a cheap PC with a 32gb 9700 (or two!) in it is far cheaper. This specific thread was about someone who already has a MacBook. A cheap PC and GPU pairs well. Or a spark: slower but more memory. Or fuck it! Get a 5090 or a 6000!

I have to see I'm in the rtx camp. A dual rtx3090 workstation with 200G of ram and zen5 9950x cpu. All watercooled.

The only reason I can tell it's on, is the very quiet hum of the slow speed water pump. Large fans run at 1200rpm and are fully quiet.

I have over a meter of radiators there.

Fun fact, I bought my first rtx3090 4 years ago. A year ago I bought another one and they are still the same price used.

I may buy another one (for my servers)

>You clearly do not seem to understand how convenient the MacMini actually IS - the form factor, how quiet it is, how durable it is, how well it integrates with other Macs, how well it works as a bridge to a personal agent like Hermes (integration with iMessage, Calendar, Reminders, iCloud, etc).

If you are that locked in to Apple, its pretty easy to buy a used Mac Mini older gen for all the non AI stuff.

But this is a discussion about inference. Buying a Mac anything for any sort of local inference is a COLOSSAL waste of money.

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