Mac Studio M5 128GB vs GMKTec Evo x2: is Apple Silicon worth $1500 more for local LLMs?
New-Pressure-6932 · reddit · 2026-11-02
A hobbyist with an M1 Max 64GB and M4 Mini 24G debates buying a Mac Studio M5 128GB over the $1500-cheaper GMKTec Evo x2 for local inference. His distilled Qwen 3.6 35B handles chat but struggles at coding and financial analysis, and 27B models run too slow. He weighs Thunderbolt clustering with Apple Silicon against price, driven by distrust of cloud subscriptions and data privacy concerns.
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