Local LLMs on Refurb M4 Max vs new M5 Max
r/LocalLLaMA
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Generative AI
Data Science
AI Hardware
Open Source AI
Hoping the community can guide me on this one. I'm on the fence about the following purchase: Refurbished 16-inch MacBook Pro Apple M4 Max Chip with 16‑Core CPU and 40‑Core GPU, 64gb ram, 1Tb Dr for $3,479.00 vs The new 16-inch MacBook Pro Apple M5 Max Chip with 18‑core CPU, 40‑core GPU, 64gb ram, 2Tb Dr for $4,599.00 I'm drawn to the refurb due to price. I'm going to be using it for work (data scientist & intelligence analyst), but I also want to run models like Gemma 4 31B at Q8, and Qwen3.6-27B Q8. Mainly data work (derivation and data element extraction etc.