Choosing a Mac Mini for local LLMs — what would YOU actually buy?

Reddit r/LocalLLaMA News
apple-silicon mac-mini local-llm hardware-advice community-discussion ollama

Summary

A community discussion post seeking advice on which Mac Mini configuration (M4, M2 Pro, or M1 Max) to purchase for running local LLMs with Ollama and coding assistants, with the decision complicated by rumored M5 releases and current supply shortages.

Got three options on my radar and genuinely can't decide. Not looking for spec sheets — want to hear from people actually running this stuff daily: M4 (32GB) — newest but apparently the slowest of the three for inference? M2 Pro (32GB) — heard it actually beats the base M4 on tok/s M1 Max (64GB) — oldest chip but highest memory bandwidth Running Ollama, coding assistants (Qwen/Kimi), maybe some RAG pipelines. Budget is $2–3k so I'm not totally screwed on options. And yeah obv openclaw to stop spending on closed models. The big thing holding me back: there are strong rumours that Apple is dropping an M5 Mac Mini and M5 Mac Studio around WWDC 2026. Apparently stock on current models is already drying up (4–5 month wait times in some configs). So do I pull the trigger now or sit tight a few more months? What's you are using ? And if you were buying today, would you wait for M5 or just grab the M4 Pro 48GB and get to work?
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