Qwen3.5 tops 64GB Mac picks

Local coding on 64GB unified memory is now good enough to be a workflow choice, not just a curiosity. The hard part is picking the right tradeoff between speed, context, and model quality, and this thread points pretty clearly at Qwen3.5.

• –27B looks like the safest balance for interactive coding; 35B-A3B buys more capability but will feel heavier.
• –The 256K native context window matters more than raw size for agentic work, since repo-wide edits and multi-step debugging need long memory.
• –Uncensored variants may reduce refusals, but they do not automatically code better; instruction tuning and eval quality still matter most.
• –A 1TB SSD is enough for a few quantized checkpoints, but model sprawl becomes the real storage problem.
• –Image/video models are technically possible on this class of machine, but text/code workloads will be the highest-value use.