Augmented Mind · Research

Local AI on a Mac, measured

How fast and how good local AI models are on a Mac, measured on real machines: LLM tokens per second as the conversation grows, transcription speed, photo captioning speed and quality, and how much an Apple Silicon Mac changes all of it compared with an Intel one. We run these benchmarks to decide which models our apps should run on the Mac they are installed on, and we publish the numbers because the same questions come up for anyone running AI locally.

The harness, scripts and aggregate results are public at github.com/rememberthis-ai/local-ai-benchmarks. If you have a Mac we haven’t measured, run it and send a pull request with your results.

Posts

May 2026

Local LLM speed on a Mac: Apple Silicon vs Intel, tokens per second — two weeks on an M1 Max and an Intel i9: ollama against SwiftLM from 4K to 64K tokens of context, Whisper transcription at 33× real time on Apple Silicon, vision models scored for caption speed and quality, and which model fits each amount of memory.