Macs for Local LLM and Openclaw - What I wish I had known.....

After running multiple models on my Mac, what I've come to learn is that it isn't the tokens/second that becomes the issue, but the prompt processing. If you're just using a local LLM for chat, it can respond instantly/near-instantly. However, with an AI agent, your agent is injecting a large context into each prompt. It is that prompt processing that makes your AI agent seem slow; Mac is very slow in prompt processing in comparison to an Nvidia GPU. It seems odd to me that so many recommend Macs for Openclaw local LLM. Honestly, you can get a cheap cloud subscription to something like Deepseek and utilize it for years before even coming close to the cost of a capable Mac. Really, the only reason to use a Mac as your local LLM provider is if you are concerned with privacy and the information must stay local. Otherwise, I think the better option, at least right now, is to use cloud models. They perform better and the Mac hardware just can't compete.