u/captainxarun

Hi everyone, I have a MacBook with the base M4 chip and I’m thinking about running LLMs locally using tools like Ollama or Local LLaMA. My main goal is to use a local model for coding help, prompt experimentation, and building small automation workflows. Before I invest time setting this up, I wanted to ask people who have tried it on Apple Silicon: is it actually worth running LLMs locally on a base M4, or does performance become a limitation? If it’s not really practical, what would you recommend instead—smaller optimized models, a different setup, or just sticking with API-based models?