Apple M5 Max, dual M4 minis spark debate

This is a status check on the local-AI arms race: Apple silicon buys quiet, efficient, memory-rich boxes, while the usual counterargument is still "just get the biggest Nvidia card you can afford."

• –128GB unified memory is the real enabler here, because it makes larger quantized models and longer-context agents practical on a single machine.
• –The dual M4 Mac minis hint at a home-lab approach, but Apple stacks are still about flexibility and power draw more than linear speed scaling.
• –Apple is clearly marketing M5 Max MacBook Pro around on-device AI and local LLMs, so this setup fits the direction the platform is heading.
• –The top reply captures the tradeoff perfectly: portability and silence versus raw token throughput and better price/perf from discrete GPUs.