Your 128GB M4 Max Is Useless for Local AI. Here’s the Metric That Actually Matters.
The biggest lie in local AI is that more RAM equals a better experience. We obsess over loading massive models and bragging about tokens per second, but the true bottleneck is prefill latency. If your $4,000 machine takes ten seconds to read your prompt before generating a single word, it’s already broken. Interactive snappiness beats parameter count.