Lao Guo's Learning Space
Nov 9, 2026 · Artificial Intelligence
48GB M5 Pro Mac mini: 27B Is the Coding Threshold, 4-bit Quantization the Sweet Spot
The article analyzes the M5 Pro Mac mini with 48GB unified memory as the cost-effective sweet spot for local LLM coding, showing that 27B models like Qwen3.8-27B at 4-bit quantization (Q4_K_M) achieve ~25 tokens/second, while smaller models lack capability and 70B models exceed memory capacity; 4-bit optimizes context window over higher quantization.
4-bit quantization48GB unified memoryM5 Pro Mac mini
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