I’m pretty happy with what a 32GB Mac Studio can do for a lot of tasks. They’re the things I’d throw a model like Haiku at, but still genuinely useful. We don’t have an answer to frontier models in the consumer range yet, but we’re not totally trapped.

Side note though, it’s the speed that bothers me more than the reasoning. Qwen 3.5 is awesome, but my Claude subscription can tear through similar workloads an order of magnitude faster than my local LLM can when using Haiku. That’ll matter a lot to some people.

Yeah this is the real killer. slower and more expensive is tough.