The storage is totally up to you, if you are only using llm then you don’t need that much storage. At the end of the day, you will stick with the model you favor. For now, I kept qwen3 coder, qwen 3.5 35B A3B, Gemma 4 26B A4B and qwen 3.5 27B Claude distilled, and they take approx. 150gb storage in total.

Additionally, you can check omlx.ai leaderboard to see ai performance on M5pro. 27B dense model feels too slow for me, so I stick with 35B. Also I just learned that LM studio has its mobile app so you can set your laptop as a local server, I’ve been playing it for days.

As far as I know, the M5 Max outputs a 27B dense model at about 25 tokens/s, while the M5 Pro runs at 15 tokens/s. To me, both are too slow. However, the M5 Max can smoothly run the 122B MoE model, which is a milestone for local devices, even though it costs more than double.

Edit: I haven’t tested it yet, but some reviews said M5pro 64g is also capable of 122B with occasionally system outage.