My Mac Studio with 96GB of RAM is maybe just at the low end of passable. It's actually extremely good for local image generation. I could somewhat replace something like Nano Banana comfortably on my machine.

But I don't need Nano Banana very much, I need code. While it can, there's no way I would ever opt to use a local model on my machine for code. It makes so much more sense to spend $100 on Codex, it's genuinely not worth discussing.

For non-thinking tasks, it would be a bit slower, but a viable alternative for sure.

You just need to adjust your workflow to use the smaller models for coding. It's primarily just a case of holding them wrong if you end up with worse outputs.