Changelog

15 August 2026 — speed model refitted, Qwen3.8-27B, click-tracked affiliate links

The speed model was refitted, and 134 estimates changed. An audit against our own published formula found that 63 estimated figures were physically impossible — they implied a model reading its weights faster than the memory bus can deliver them. Llama 3.1 8B was listed at 75 tok/s on an M4 whose bandwidth caps it at 26. The cause was a single efficiency multiplier, which cannot fit both a 30B model (genuinely bandwidth-bound) and a 3B one (dominated by fixed per-token cost). The estimator is now a two-term formula whose constants are solved from the two vendor-published Apple Silicon figures in the dataset, then validated against a third it had never seen: predicted 24.7 tok/s vs 24 measured, +3%. Full derivation on the methodology page. No measured figure was altered — sourced and community rows are never recomputed, and two that had been overwritten were restored. The benchmarks table also now carries a provenance mark on every speed cell; it previously shipped 202 numbers with none, which contradicted our own rule.

New entry. Qwen3.8-27B (Alibaba, Apache 2.0) went public on 14 August and enters the index at Score 71, narrowly ahead of Qwen 3.6-27B (70) — both are estimated at ~29–30 tok/s under the refitted model, so the capability score is what separates them. It is a 27.8B dense model with a native vision encoder and a 262K context window; at 4-bit it needs about 19 GB, so it fits a 24 GB Mac. It benchmarks above Qwen 3.6-27B on every published coding row. Nobody has published an Apple Silicon tok/s figure for it, so the speed cell is estimated from the bandwidth model (the 16 GB 4-bit build against 600 GB/s), never presented as a measurement. Catalog is now 81 verified models. GLM-5.3 was announced on 14 August but no weights exist; per the provenance rule it is not listed.

Affiliate links are now measurable. All 460 Amazon links moved from direct amazon.com hrefs to a first-party redirect at /go/az on our own Cloudflare Worker, which counts the click and then forwards. No third-party script, no cookie, no change to the privacy position. The Associates tag now lives in one place — the Worker — so it cannot be dropped by an edit, and the destination is rebuilt server-side from an allowlist, so the link cannot be pointed anywhere else. Every affiliate button now names Amazon in its own label.

Fewer dead ends. Benchmarks, Software, the leaderboard and both programmatic hubs previously had no route onward to the pages that answer “which Mac, then?” — each now ends with an explicit next step. robots.txt was also corrected: its per-crawler groups were Allow-only, which per RFC 9309 meant the disallow rules in the wildcard group were invisible to Googlebot, Bingbot and every AI crawler. Each group now carries them.

August 2026 — catalog audit & grand update

The correction. A full audit cross-checked every catalog entry against official sources (Hugging Face orgs, lab blogs, license files). Entries that could not be verified were removed: the “Qwen 4 / 4.1” family, “Llama 5” family, “Phi-5” family, “Gemma 4.5”, “DeepSeek R2/R3”, “Mistral Medium 4” & “Voyage” line, “Command R+ 2”, and “Grok 4 Open”. Misnamed entries were reconciled to their real counterparts (“GLM 5.2 Air” → GLM-4.5-Air; “Mistral Voyage 24B” → Mistral Small 3.2 24B; “DeepSeek R2” slot → DeepSeek V3.2-Speciale); licenses were corrected (Kimi K3 & K2.x are custom/Modified MIT, not plain MIT); affected pages carry correction notes and removed URLs redirect. Their benchmark rows were removed from the open dataset.

The update. Catalog now 80 verified models. Added the real July–August wave: Muse Glimmer 30B (Meta’s Apache 2.0 return), DeepSeek V4 Flash (runs on 128GB Macs), Inkling & Inkling-Small (Thinking Machines), Kimi K3 (weights, corrected license), Qwen3.8-2.4T-A95B, Qwen 3.6-27B (new verified Mac #1), Laguna S/XS 2.1, Nemotron 3.5 Lightning, KAT-Coder-V2.5, Ling-3.0 Flash, Hunyuan Hy3, Solar Open 2, Apertus 1.5, GLM-4.7-Flash, and the on-device wave (Bonsai 27B, Maple Preview, LFM2.5-2.6B, Nanbeige4.2-3B). Benchmarks: 202 rows (now labeled estimated / vendor-sourced / community per row) incl. new M1 Ultra, M2 Max and M3 Ultra coverage; harness annotations added to SWE-Bench Pro claims. Published the August State of Open-Source Local LLMs report and reissued July as a corrected edition.

July 2026

Expanded the leaderboard to 79 models, including several entries later removed by the August audit (see above). Launched Best LLM by Mac pages (ranked per chip + RAM). Published the July State of Open-Source Local LLMs report. Privacy hardening: removed all third-party analytics and fonts; added privacy & terms pages. Truth & provenance layer: every figure now labeled estimated/sourced/community with published estimation math; launched the Mac Advisor, Cite & Contribute pages and the open llmcheck-data repo.

June 2026

Published the June State of Open-Source Local LLMs report. Added new tok/s benchmark data across M4 and M5 chips and expanded the guides & troubleshooting hub.

May 2026

Published the May State of Open-Source Local LLMs report. Grand catalog refresh across model families and RAM tiers.

April 2026

Published the first monthly State of Open-Source Local LLMs report and expanded the Apple Silicon benchmark database.