Local AI Gets Serious on the M5 Ultra Mac Studio

This week on AppStories, John interviews Federico about his review of the M5 Ultra Mac Studio and it local AI capabilities.
On AppStories+, Federico takes listeners behind the scenes on how he tested the M5 Ultra Mac Studio.
Also available on YouTube here (youtube.com/playlist?list=PLDSpdP6G2mHvrG8-Mlf…).
Sponsored By:
• Workbench (astropad.com/product/workbench/?utm_source=app…): Remote desktop for AI agents and headless Mac minis. Free to use for 20 minutes/day.
• Claude (claude.ai/appstories) – For problems worth solving — get started with Claude today.
Links and Show Notes
Running Local AI Models on Apple's Latest Macs
• M5 Ultra Mac Studio Review: The Dream Mac for Local AI Agents (macstories.net/stories/m5-ultra-mac-studio-rev…)
Apple Hardware
• Mac Studio (apple.com/newsroom/2026/08/apple-introduces-ne…)
• Mac mini (apple.com/newsroom/2026/08/apple-unveils-a-mor…)
• Studio Display XDR (apple.com/studio-display-xdr)
Local Models
• huggingface.co/Qwen/Qwen3.8-Flash-Next
• huggingface.co/Qwen/Qwen3.8-27B
• huggingface.co/deepseek-ai/DeepSeek-V4-Flash
• huggingface.co/zai-org/GLM-5.3-Flash
• Cohere Transcribe (cohere.com/blog/transcribe)
• Qwen3-TTS (huggingface.co/collections/Qwen/qwen3-tts)
• huggingface.co/Qwen/Qwen-Image-2.1
Local Inference and Clustering
• oMLX (github.com/jundot/omlx)
• github.com/exo-explore/exo
Agent Apps and Tools
• Hermes Agent (hermes-agent.nousresearch.com)
• Hermes Agent on GitHub (github.com/nousresearch/hermes-agent)
• Open Minis (apps.apple.com/us/app/open-minis/id6759188481)
• Cadu (cadu.bot)
• OpenAI Brings Computer Use to Codex App on Windows (thurrott.com/a-i/openai-a-i/336754/openai-brin…)
Frontier Models and Workflow
• GPT-6 Astra (openai.com/index/gpt-6-astra)
• Claude Fable 5.1 (anthropic.com/claude-fable-and-mythos-5-1)
• Claude Projects (anthropic.com/news/projects)
• Artificial Analysis Intelligence Index (artificialanalysis.ai/evaluations/artificial-a…)
• Elyx (elyx.design)
NVIDIA PC Comparison
• GeForce RTX 5090 (nvidia.com/en-us/geforce/graphics-cards/50-ser…)
• Lian Li A3-mATX (lian-li.com/product/a3-matx)
• NVIDIA DGX Spark (nvidia.com/en-us/products/workstations/dgx-spark)
AppStories+ Post-Show:
• A preview of how Federico used local AI models to support his iOS and iPadOS 27 review.
Leave Feedback for John and Federico
• AppStories Feedback Form (giant-smash-219.notion.site/8a3f949b3c664864bd…)
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