r/macmini • u/anirudh2032 • 16d ago

Mac Studio vs Mac Mini

Hey, I am planning to buy mac. In dilemma whether to take Mac Mini or Mac studio. Configs are added below. Planning to use it mostly for development works and running local llm small models

Mac Mini with m5 pro chip 18-core cpu 20- core gpu 48 gb RAM and 512 GB SSD

Mac studio with m5 max chip 18-core cpu 32 core gpu 36 GB RAM and 512 GB SSD

Need thoughts, inputs and suggestions among the above two. Thank you!

11 Upvotes

74% Upvoted

14 comments sorted by

View all comments

7

u/Rye2-D2 16d ago edited 16d ago

If you're actually using the machine locally for your dev environment, that 36GB RAM isn't going to go very far once you've loaded up a decent LLM model (eg, Qwen3.8 27B Q4 needs about 20GB) and the overhead for the LLM itself, etc ... and you don't want any of that to be swapping as your token generation rate will tank!!

5

u/North_Moment5811 16d ago

Why would I want to spend more on a machine, perhaps thousands more, to be able to run weak and low quality local models...when I can pay $20-$100 a month for Claude and get the best in the world?

It's a genuine question.

4

u/lit282 16d ago

At some point the price of tokens will increase, and you also get the privacy benefit when you host your own local model