alt Hacker NewsNVIDIA's 3090 was released in September 2020. Apple's M1 was released ~2 months later. Anyone with a 5 year old M1 Mac with 32GB or more RAM can run a 4-bit quantized version of Qwen3.8 27B on their machine. AFAICT, there are ~110m Apple Silicon Macs in the world. I'd wager that at least ~20% of those have enough memory to run this model. And if you account for gamers with NVIDIA and AMD cards, I'd wager that the segment is at least an order of magnitude bigger.
> Even if we assume that models will no longer improve and we reach a point where everyone can run Fable in their laptop, surely running 1000x Fable agents would give you an advantage.
IMO, asymptotic advantages are marginal. At least for coding, we got a glimpse into how much of an advantage it gives (or doesn't) when the Claude Code codebase leaked[1] ~4 months ago. :)
As someone typing this on an M1 Mac with 32 GB of RAM who tried using 3.8 27B (Q4_K_M) yesterday in both LM Studio and llama.cpp, I wouldn't call it particularly usable in terms of token speed. (and that was with `--spec-type draft-mtp` for llama.cpp).
If you want to leave it running with the fans going crazy for 40 mins or overnight or something, fair enough, but otherwise it doesn't seem worth it to me. It's certainly not "interactive", even taking into account the over-thinking it does by default.
The 3.6 (maybe they'll release a 3.8?) MoE model is much more usable (but obviously not as good) on this machine spec.