It's not free. You're paying electricity and you're ignoring the cost of the hardware. Even on electricity alone, there are cloud providers who may beat your laptop on price per million tokens. Qwen 3.8 flash is interesting in this space.

Not to say that there aren't other benefits of running models locally, I loaded Qwen 3.8 27B 6bit MLX just yesterday.

Thats only important if running it locally is critical for privacy reasons or just as a hobby.

Time has a cost in business. If a model needs 30 million tokens to achieve a similar result as another that can do it in 10 million, that 60 tokens per second will take a long time.

Right now qwen 3.6 35b-a3b has a success rate of 92% and qwen 3.8 27b has a success rate of 96%. But the 35b moe does about 1080 tokens/s at concurrency 54, vs 480 tokens/s at concurrency 28. For our specific workflow on blackwell.

Of course enormous batch jobs are different. I was explicit when I said consumer laptop.