They aren't. Apple Silicon is unusable for interactive prefill and decode speeds in agentic workflows and SOTA LLMs.

You’re just out of the loop, and that’s fine but it’s worth learning about.

There is a pretty large and growing community of us using entirely local models for our agentic flows. From GLM 4.7 flash on 32gb machines with >60tok/s to Gemma and Qwen dense and MOE models on 64gb machines all the way up to Deepseek V4 flash on 128gb machines with 450tok/s prefill and 25-30tok/s decode.

I use DS4 on the daily - it’s become my main model.

I know it’s in fashion to talk trash about Apple but their hardware outperforms other options like DGX Sparc when it comes to local inference, they got the unified memory, memory bandwidth and the GPU cores to actually be useful in a way that most other hardware just isn’t.

▲

aroman 7 hours ago | parent | next [-]

My hardware isn't powerful enough to try, so I'm asking out of genuine curiosity, not to push back: what do you use DS4 for? Did it replace e.g Claude Code with Opus for you, or was it replacing something else?

	▲	kamranjon 3 hours ago \| parent [-]
		I use it as my main coding agent - so its running DS4 server on my 128gb mbp and I run the pi coding agent on my other machine which calls out to it. Mostly Go and Typescript work. I also use it in local agent mode if im coding directly on the machine which is nice cause you can save sessions and resume them, and so for personal projects and training related stuff it's been great. Even got an autoresearch loop going where the agent looks at the previous run, adjusts parameters and code if needed, and then hands off training to another script (so full system resources are available for training), ad infinitum - it works really well - what antirez has done with that project is pretty incredible.

▲

johncalvinyoung 5 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Isn't Deepseek V4 Flash still like 150+ GB even at Q4?

▲

bigyabai 5 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

> From GLM 4.7 flash

GLM 4.7 Flash is a 30b model that was far behind SOTA at launch, and I know that because I pay for z.ai inference and have run the model locally. Qwen and Deepseek V4 Flash have the same issue, and beg the question; are you really going to process a 64k agentic context at 450tok/s? That's 2+ minutes that you spend waiting for the first token to generate! Of course nobody can sell that as competitive inference, and it only gets worse with larger models. We're talking about non-interactive speeds, here.

If you're satisfied with small local models, more power to you. It puts you in the same barrel as Strix Halo enthusiasts or the guys that bought 2x3090s on Reddit. You are completely ignoring the market if you think that any of those SOCs are unprecedented or unparalleled for inference workloads, though. The free DS4 API is faster at prefill and decode, you could not give away Mac inference at zero cost and compete with what China provides for free. That's how far behind Macs are for local inference, to put things into perspective.