I use a Macbook Pro with 128GB RAM "unified memory" that's available to both CPU and GPU.
It's slower than a rented Nvidia GPU, but usable for all the models I've tried (even gpt-oss-120b), and works well in a coffee shop on battery and with no internet connection.
I use Ollama to run the models, so can't run the latest until they are ported to the Ollama library. But I don't have much time for tinkering anyway, so I don't mind the publishing delay.
I’d strongly advise ditching Ollama for LM Studio, and using MLX versions of the models. They run quite a bit faster on Apple Silicon. Also, LM Studio is much more polished and feature rich than Ollama.
How's the battery holding up during vibe coding sessions or occasional LLM usage? I've been thinking about getting a MacBook or a laptop with a similar Ryzen chip specifically for that reason.
Currently I don't use vibe coding or even code assistants, so I can't speak to how the battery fares when doing that sort of thing. I don't know how much or how intensively they need to run the underlying LLMs.
For chatting with LLMs via ollama, I've seen total power usage go to about 50W (on an M3 Max) while the LLM is active, which is about 3x-4x power usage compared to just idling with browsers and editors open.
So I'd estimate about 2-3 hours of continuous LLM use on battery. Because I have enough RAM spare, at least there's no need to keep shutting down and reloading models.
I haven't really pushed it to find out how long they run on battery, as I haven't used LLMs all that much.
I'm more interested in the underlying operations of how they work, investigating novel model architectures and techniques, and optimising performance, than actually using them as an end user :-) Similar to how I enjoyed writing game engines more than playing games :-) Maybe I'll get into using them more in future.
It's slower than a rented Nvidia GPU, but usable for all the models I've tried (even gpt-oss-120b), and works well in a coffee shop on battery and with no internet connection.
I use Ollama to run the models, so can't run the latest until they are ported to the Ollama library. But I don't have much time for tinkering anyway, so I don't mind the publishing delay.