Others will have a better idea since they've been messing around with local inference longer than I, but I am quite impressed with the models I have been loading on my laptop with only iGPU. As of this week I no longer feel like I am playing second fiddle with slow inference and small models. Gemma 4 (and maybe Qwen3.5, haven't tried it yet) seem to have changed the game this month!

Even with trying some absolutely shiiiiite models (I only had 16GB unified RAM at the start), I was suitably impressed that I splashed the $300 to double my RAM. I am happy that this one time cost was enough to break through to smarter models and faster inference. No ongoing cloud costs!

This one has "generic healing" for issues present in the current generation of local small LLMs, but if things we see from Frontier LLMs generalize, "optimized healing" for quirks present on your pick of local LLM would be more useful.