bjacobt

I’m curious how people setup local LLM today? What type of hardware do you have? What model and software do you use for general chat (mostly for learning new subjects), coding and RAG.

My 2015 15" MBP is showing its age after 8 years of use (almost daily) and I'm in search of a new macbook and can anyone share their experiences with the newer M2 macs?

I've narrowed it down to

1. 15" M2 Macbook Air with 24GB RAM & 1 TB hard disk - $2099

2. 16" M2 PRO Macbook Pro with 32GB RAM & 1 TB hard disk - $3099

3. 16" M2 MAX Macbook Pro with 32GB RAM & 1 TB hard disk - $3249 (Costco)

I prefer the AIR for it's price, but I'm worried if it is a good laptop for my use? My current laptop has its fan on high speed all the time and I'm worried if AIR can handle the load. I'm not concerned about weight/size and prefer to have a machine that works for a few years.

I'll have dual monitor setup with laptop display and 27" 4k external monitor

I have these applications open daily 1. MS Word, Excel, Powerpoint, Outlook & MS Teams + Zoom 2. Lots of open tabs on Safari, Chrome & Firefox including Slack. 3. At least three VS Code editors (backend node, frontend react/angular + tooling, C++ for IoT firmware dev) 4. At least two PyCharm editors for moving data, API calls and some Neural Network inference (no training) 5. Postgresql db with multiple databases, and Redis 7. Few node applications (backend) 8. Few docker containers 9. Few tabs of iTerm connected to remote servers via SSH 10. Remote Desktop for Windows Server access

Thanks for any recommendations.

Edit: formatting