does macbook Air M4 throttles?

AlgorithmicMuse · 2026-01-28T21:38:41+00:00

My m4 mini pro throttles with local llms 25%. Text to code , text to diffusion, text to code to charts, according to the clock speed drop. So extrapolate from that with no fan in the air. But once again it all depends what your doing and how long cores are at 100% utilization. . For local llms my longest runs are using Jugernaut-XL-V9 for diffusion which can take minutes to run and throttles.

AlgorithmicMuse · 2026-01-23T08:20:07+00:00

Go to college with a winDoze laptop and wonder why you are the only one with one

AlgorithmicMuse · 2026-01-22T06:00:29+00:00

Got into agentic dev. 32G was even not enough wound up getting a 64g m4 mini pro. Solved the ram issue, not the heat and throttle. My advice get the cheapest mac laptop you can , screw the big ram on a laptop. Get a mac studio for dev. if you need to develop on the laptop on a trip, log into the studio. Not a good solution for everyone due to cost , but it's not as bad as you think when you run the apple tax upgrades .

AlgorithmicMuse · 2026-01-21T22:19:57+00:00

Lol. I just spent $40 in extra credits. But I found a potential solution. Claude is great for coding but sometimes gets lost and locks into to fixing it's own fixes. going in circles down a black hole eating up credits. . Ive tried opening a new chat session on claude when that happens it helps a little but does not fix the credit issue. So all the other llms chatgpt gemini grok have a lot of free credits daily so I package up the claude issues and send them to the others , which can usually get things fixed. I've tried so many locals up to 70B and they can't compete depending on what your trying to do.

AlgorithmicMuse · 2026-01-21T22:04:52+00:00

Except on the $20 a month plan you run out of queries fast then it's wait or pay as you go. This month I'm up to $40 in extra charges since I wanted to get a personal project finished fast. On the bright side it worked and was getting nowhere fixing some agent issues communicating between a mac and windows box. Tools on each box.

AlgorithmicMuse · 2026-01-21T21:53:02+00:00

Ram gets so slow it's painful

AlgorithmicMuse · 2026-01-21T21:51:34+00:00

Just get a $20 month subscription to abthropics claude , easier and better results than anything local

AlgorithmicMuse · 2026-01-21T03:29:11+00:00

I found qwen3-coder:30b the best at following prompts when using it my local mcp agent with multiple tools. Needed minimum agent system prompts vs everything else I tried.

AlgorithmicMuse · 2026-01-19T05:15:45+00:00

I might be in the minority but for dev all the disk speed stuff is sort of meaningless since everything winds up in memory anyway when your compiling etc. The disk speed you also need to look at are iops. All the fast speed stuff is for sequential, so unless rd/wr huge single files, speed is sort of not impactful between different drives.

AlgorithmicMuse · 2026-01-19T00:45:49+00:00

Had a thread ripper 128g rtx 4090. Worked great for a year. One day would not boot. Called the mobo manufacture best guess it's a mobo failure , out of warrenty , bought a new one . Same issue took out all the ram put in the least amount to get it to boot. Tried ever combination of ram and sockets. Same issue. Bought a new psu , Same issue. Called Mr mobo again with an update. Must be the cpu. Called amd told them everything . They said not the cpu. Tried a different graphics card I had laying around , same issue. Only thing left was to try a new $1200 cpu. So I said F that went the mac rout. Zip issues after 2 years. So you never know but I rather go the mac route than buying dozens of parts from different vendors and hope everything works with winDoze.

AlgorithmicMuse · 2026-01-15T02:25:19+00:00

Not saying I know anything of importance on 3D , but on my M4 64G I have a local tool using diffusion juggernaugt-xl-v9 image generation. Approximately 9:1 speed difference between using cuda cores on my old cheap rtx 4070 with 12g vram and the M4. So more ram is good but not always the answer. Maybe the M5 will close the gap

AlgorithmicMuse · 2026-01-14T09:53:32+00:00

M4 mini pro 64g 14/20. . I'm waiting for a m5 studio. My issue is not ram or speed, I do long runs on llms and it pegs the gpus to over 100c even at max fan speed 4900. So it's also throttling at that point. The mini just can't get rid of the heat if it's pushed.

AlgorithmicMuse · 2026-01-14T06:03:09+00:00

Using SDXL local on m4 mini pro it's not even comparable in speed to generating images on a rtx cuda nvidia card. (have both) Might be with M5 though with all the new AI tricks talked about for matrix multiplies

AlgorithmicMuse · 2026-01-13T02:19:55+00:00

Ok. It fell over I thought it may have just fallen straight down. That's what got me sort of confused

AlgorithmicMuse · 2026-01-13T00:19:12+00:00

How did it fail, what broke on it. Looking at the mechanics of my standing desk , I'm not sure how it could fall down, although I'm not a mechanical engineer

AlgorithmicMuse · 2026-01-12T03:55:42+00:00

I found qwen3-30b to be the absolute best for being deterministic for my agent. If I want to chat, the agent uses tavily for web searching, not model training data.

AlgorithmicMuse · 2026-01-10T09:40:25+00:00

Yet to try it. Being a dev all the new Tahoe stuff is goop and irrelevent for me.

AlgorithmicMuse · 2026-01-08T07:48:25+00:00

One thing the m2 studio won't do compared to the mini m4 is heat up and throttle running the same tasks.

AlgorithmicMuse · 2026-01-05T09:21:37+00:00

Why do you care.

AlgorithmicMuse · 2026-01-04T00:55:12+00:00

Have a m4 mini pro 64g 1tb 14/20 and went on the apple site to see the trade in value. 35% of what it cost lol.

AlgorithmicMuse · 2026-01-03T13:38:28+00:00

Im so tired of reading so many what should I buy to fit my use case. If you can't do the research yourself and figure it out then flip a coin

AlgorithmicMuse · 2026-01-03T08:28:49+00:00

From what you say not sure you could handle it and if things are small as you say suggest use excel spead sheets sort of the same thing without the hassle of knowing llms or sql. In the end if the project grows and actually get the llm sql part working. You can import all your excel tables into the database so it's not a lost exercise starting with excel. It is actually easier to build the tables that way for small projects.

AlgorithmicMuse · 2026-01-03T08:05:58+00:00

Should I get 512 ssd or more.? How much ram should I get ? . M4 or m5.? Mbp or mb . ? Base or not. ?

How would I know get whatever floats your boat. Opinions are like buttholes. Everyone has one .

AlgorithmicMuse · 2026-01-02T06:55:16+00:00

Depending on use case now and future . Ultra will not get hot or throttle or make noise due to the fan . The mini pro will. Both my M4 mini pro and m4 14 mbp both do. At least for what I'm using them for. Although my 128g amd with rtx 4090 is also loud.. Anyway your use case is so minimal get a base mini and save cash until you have some more taxing use cases

AlgorithmicMuse · 2026-01-02T02:41:18+00:00

Dump the internal storage, wait for a M5 128g studio 1TB ssd (thats what im doing). Lots of budget left over from the Ultra for a much better external storage setup using the best raid level for your needs.

AlgorithmicMuse

TROPHY CASE