Upgrading My Desktop Hardware

The last time I bought a MacBook Pro was in 2014. I was young and full of bravado, and I liked nice things — I dropped a hefty 12,000 yuan on it. But given my work environment, the Mac ecosystem lacked many programs I needed. After two years without recouping the cost, I gave it away.

Recently I got into vibe coding and tried running the qwen2.5vl:3b vision model for object recognition on a Windows PC with a GTX 1650 4GB graphics card. To my surprise, a 720p image took two minutes to process. Higher resolutions would just blow up the VRAM. That’s when the idea of upgrading my hardware was born.

Running larger models requires more memory. Right now, RAM is more expensive than gold. For an average person to spend a fortune building a high-end local model, it’s simply not cost-effective. And on the other hand, a $1,000–$2,000 local setup will never be faster or more powerful than cloud models.

Last year, when the Mac mini was subsidized down to around 2,600 yuan, I considered buying one. But I held back for practical reasons. This year, the surge in popularity of OpenClaw drove Mac mini prices up again, and since I already had a Linux machine that could run it, I still didn’t make the move.

But this time, I finally found a reason to buy it: 16GB of memory, enough to run the qwen2.5vl:7b model — image recognition in just a few seconds at 720p. So I didn’t hesitate and bought one on Xianyu (China’s secondhand marketplace) for a little over 3,500 yuan.

After getting the Mac mini, I hooked it up to my 24-inch 2K monitor, and the text was a blurry mess. No choice but to hop on Xianyu again and buy a Xiaomi monitor.

Then I noticed the keyboard wasn’t comfortable either. Well, time to grab another cheap keyboard.

Now I’ve realized that even the Mac mini M4 base model with 16GB RAM can’t satisfy my competitive streak. Running the qwen3.5:9b model, even a simple question takes a minute or two to answer (the inference time is absurdly long).

So, should I wait for the M5 and pick up a 24GB Mac mini to try out?