RTX PRO 5000 (48GB) vs MacBook Pro M5 MAX (128GB RAM) - The choice for fine-tuning & agentic coding
r/LocalLLaMA
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Machine Learning
Generative AI
AI Hardware
Open Source AI
AI Research
TL;DR: If you had to choose one for a professional de who lives in HuggingFace weights, Unsloth scripts to fine-tune, and llama.cpp/vllm servers for local inference, which machine is the better long-term investment? I’m currently at a crossroads and need some community wisdom. I’m looking to buy for a very specific AI development workflow, and I’m thinking between an NVIDIA RTX PRO 5000 48GB (Blackwell) workstation and a MacBook Pro M5 Max 128GB. My job is just needing to fine-tune with small/quantized models (< 32B). I see the VGA is the clearly winner.