Ollama vs LM Studio vs llama.cpp — A No-BS Guide to Running LLMs Locally on macOS
21 Apr 2025
Let’s cut the fluff: if you care about privacy, speed, and having full control over your stack, running LLMs locally is no longer optional — it’s survival. Cloud’s nice until it’s not. Especially when your data is the product and your API bill explodes overnight.
I put this guide together because I wanted LLMs running locally, even with limited hardware — no vendor lock-in, no middlemen sniffing packets, just raw local compute. And yes, I run this stuff daily on a MacBook Air M1 with 16GB RAM. Modest? Yep. Enough? Hell yes.