u/Clementine-TeX

I’m on the 14” M5 Pro (15-Core CPU, 16-Core GPU) MacBook Pro with 24 GB unified memory, which according to LM Studio’s System Hardware section gives me 17.76 GB of VRAM.

The models I’m most interested in are (from most to least):

• Qwen3.5-9B-OptiQ-4bit - For general use (thinking)
• Gemma-4-12B-it-OptiQ-4bit - For general use (thinking)
• Qwen3.6-27B-MLX-4bit - For general use (thinking), and some coding (non-thinking)
• Gemma-4-26B-A4B-it-OptiQ-4bit - For general use (thinking)
• Qwen3-Coder-30B-A3B-Instruct-MLX-4bit - For coding (non-thinking)

My goal is basically to have a local ChatGPT/Claude “replacement” that’s actually useful day-to-day.

Things I care about:

• Everything staying local
• No API costs
• Vibe Coding help
• Large LaTeX Manuscript Formatting/Writing
• Web Re/search
• As much context as I can realistically get on this hardware

I’ve been tried LM Studio, but noticed that even the 9B models eat up RAM and swap at longer context lengths. Not to mention, they can often get into long loops about nonsense.

As such, I’m considering switching to oMLX, and connecting the models to the internet (to prevent those loops and hallucinations). How shall I go by doing that given my requirements?

I know I shouldn’t expect much, but that’s why I want to maximize what I have, especially since the RAM is a huge bottleneck for me. But I didn’t buy this specifically for Local AI use -- only got interested in it after the fact.

Any advice is appreciated. Thanks.

(P.S. I used AI to revise this post for clarity. English isn’t my first language.)

https://preview.redd.it/twc20tssg77h1.png?width=2559&format=png&auto=webp&s=a7412eabc55eaf4d761dcb95e3adad8460969e0b

System Settings, Disk Utility, and Finder’s Status Bar all display different free storage values.

Running First Aid on the Disk doesn’t seem to fix the problem. I have nothing on iCloud. I don’t use Time Machine on the Mac itself. Any fixes?

https://preview.redd.it/cze6dg1ng77h1.png?width=2559&format=png&auto=webp&s=218471617076fbf14b4461a84dd105052bd7f93f

System Settings, Disk Utility, and Finder’s Status Bar all display different free storage values.

Running First Aid on the Disk doesn’t seem to fix the problem. I have nothing on iCloud. I don’t use Time Machine on the Mac itself. Any fixes?

https://preview.redd.it/ibww8dl5g77h1.png?width=2559&format=png&auto=webp&s=36b5fafa00324378c36a89d2fdcd34c330adc8f3

System Settings, Disk Utility, and Finder’s Status Bar all display different free storage values.

Running First Aid on the Disk doesn’t seem to fix the problem. I have nothing on iCloud. I don’t use Time Machine on the Mac itself. Any fixes?