45 t/s a second is perfectly respectable especially with no limits and 24/7 uptime with very little power draw on the Studio.
Luna is at around 100 t/s for comparison, but it’s a worse model than 5.3 Flash
There's a ton of well-understood things Apple can and hopefully will do to massively accelerate every stage of this pipeline and hopefully they're hard at work implementing most of them for m7.
Your knowledge is out of date. In truth it depends on the Mac and the models used.
I asked this question on M5 Max 128GB, using Ollama model Quen3.8:27b-mlx, with thinking enabled.
Question: "Give me a python code snippet that opens a file and sorts the lines of text. "
In 2.4 seconds it gave me 4 examples that work with different sorting configurations and a summary of when to use each.
Compare that to an older model of gpt-oss:20b, took 5 seconds to finish thinking and 2 seconds to stream the answer. It gave me one python example snippet and two one liners that do the same thing.
Local models are good enough that it's not an issue.
But keep changing the goalposts if it makes you happy.