I have been running qwen 3.6 35b a3b with opencode on my macbook pro 16" with m3 max and 64gb ram, and it's been great for local planning and coding. To be honest I have been on and off wishing I had future proofed with the 128gb after seeing how powerful 64gb is. On the other hand, I also haven't run up against a wall with a model that is just slightly larger than qwen.

I've also been running Qwen 3.6 35B A3b on my Windows laptop (64 GB RAM, a 4GB GPU) and it's at least tolerable. It's not fast - a few tokens per second, slower than reading speed - but I can give it a task and come back later. That was a $600 laptop off eBay a few years ago, not a $6,000 machine.

Are these unified memory Macs and giant 24GB desktop GPUs achieving dozens or hundreds of tokens per second commensurate with their 10x-20x cost?

What is the speed on responses? (t/s)

The full 128GB is surely helpful in keeping browsers, editors and other things running since even 20-35GB models + k/v caches can eat up a lot of the core 64GB in my experience.