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Comment by Insanity | Hacker News Reader

The M-chips are insanely powerful. So powerful for my regular use that I'm still on M1-generated devices and don't really need to update. Perhaps in a few years when both local-running LLMs are good enough on regular consumer hardware there'll be a good reason to upgrade.

As a disclaimer though, I haven't even tried to really run local models on the M1 as I also have a 'gaming PC' that can run them fine.

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I feel much the same. I feel like the next time I upgrade I could splurge a bit more and get a really bigger CPU and storage to be even more productive with.

However the main reason I would upgrade is to run LLMs locally and RAM prices are making this a no-go. One day if RAM comes down to earth I'll upgrade. If not I'll stick to this old machine for a long time.

> Perhaps in a few years when both local-running LLMs are good enough on regular consumer hardware there'll be a good reason to upgrade.

I mean, local LLMs already are really good if you own Nvidia Cards, not sure what you are waiting for. 2x3090 will blow any current Mac out of the water in tok/sec

I was talking about upgrading to another M-series device. I actually mentioned in the comment that you're replying to that I do run them locally on my desktop. And I run them off of an AMD card, 7900XTX.

I'm not sure I'd consider a gaming PC 'regular consumer' hardware especially with today's prices. But yeah, it's definitely doable.

yeah my m1 mac studio shows no signs of stopping and i can't justify another upgrade until doing so really unlocks something new at a reasonable price (like running local llms that are competitive with the cloud services at a decent speed, which presumably the mac studio M5 Ultras can do with qwen 3.8 but the 256GB Ultra config is more than $10k!)

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