You still need ridiculously high spec hardware, and at Apple’s prices, that isn’t cheap. Even if you can afford it (most won't), the local models you can run are still limited and they still underperform. It’s much cheaper to pay for a cloud solution and get significantly better result. In my opinion, the article is right. We need a better way to run LLMs locally.

You still need ridiculously high spec hardware, and at Apple’s prices, that isn’t cheap.

You can easily run models like Mistral and Stable Diffusion in Ollama and Draw Things, and you can run newer models like Devstral (the MLX version) and Z Image Turbo with a little effort using LM Studio and Comfyui. It isn't as fast as using a good nVidia GPU or a cloud GPU but it's certainly good enough to play around with and learn more about it. I've written a bunch of apps that give me a browser UI talking to an API that's provided by an app running a model locally and it works perfectly well. I did that on an 8GB M1 for 18 months and then upgraded to a 24GB M4 Pro recently. I still have the M1 on my network for doing AI things in the background.

I was pleasantly surprised at the speed and power of my second hand M1 Pro 32GB running Asahi & Qwen3:32B. It does all I need, and I dont mind the reading pace output, although I'd be tempted by M2 Ultra if the secondhand market hadn't also exploded with the recent RAM market manipulations.

Anyway, I'm on a mission to have no subscriptions in the New Year. Plus it feels wrong to be contributing towards my own irrelevance (GAI).

749 for an M4 air at Amazon right now

I bought my M1 Max w/ 64gb of ram used. It's not that expensive.

Yes, the models it can run do not perform like chatgpt or claude 4.5, but they're still very useful.