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A comment on A Guide to Local Coding Models.

Re:A Guide to Local Coding Models by amarant on Monday December 22, 2025 @12:01AM (#46351465)
Buying a maxed out MacBook Pro seems like the most expensive way to go about getting the necessary compute. Apple is notorious for overcharging for hardware, especially on ram.

I bet you could build a stationary tower for half the price with comparable hardware specs. And unless I'm missing something you should be able to run these things on Linux.

Getting a maxed out non-apple laptop will also be cheaper for comparable hardware, if portability is important to you.

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Re:A Guide to Local Coding Models by Renaud on Monday December 22, 2025 @12:11AM (#46351522)
Can any x86 based system actually comes with that much unified memory?

Not an Apple fanboy, but I was under the impression that having access to up to 512GB usable GPU memory was the main feature in favour of the mac.

And now with Exo, you can even break the 512GB barrier.

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Re:A Guide to Local Coding Models by nl on Monday December 22, 2025 @01:08AM (#46351784)
You want unified RAM.

On Linux your options are the NVidia Spark (and other vendor versions) or the AMD Ryzen AI series.

These are good options, but there are significant trade-offs. I don't think there are Ryzen AI laptops with 128GB RAM for example, and they are pricey compared to traditional PCs.

You also have limited upgradeability anyway - the RAM is soldered.

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Re:A Guide to Local Coding Models by kube-system on Monday December 22, 2025 @01:32AM (#46351876)
You need memory hooked up to the GPU. Apple’s unified memory is actually one of the cheaper ways to do this. On a typical x86-64 desktop, this means VRAM… for 100+ GB of VRAM you’re deep into tens of thousand of dollars.

Also, if you think Apple’s RAM prices are crazy… you might be surprised at what current DDR5 pricing is today. The $800 that Apple charges to upgrade a MBP from 64-128GB is the current price of 64GB desktop DDR5-6000. Which is actually slower memory than the 8533 MT/s memory you’re getting in the MacBook.

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