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.

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AppStories Episode 502 - Local AI Gets Serious on the M5 Ultra Mac Studio

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39:20

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AppStories+ Deeper into the world of apps

This episode is sponsored by:

• Astropad Workbench: Remote desktop for AI agents and headless Mac minis. Free to use for 20 minutes/day.
• Claude – 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

Apple Hardware

• Mac Studio
• Mac mini
• Studio Display XDR

Local Models

• Qwen3.8-Flash-Next
• Qwen3.8-27B
• DeepSeek-V4-Flash
• GLM-5.3-Flash
• Cohere Transcribe
• Qwen3-TTS
• Qwen-Image-2.1

Local Inference and Clustering

• oMLX
• exo

Agent Apps and Tools

• Hermes Agent
• Hermes Agent on GitHub
• Open Minis
• Cadu
• OpenAI Brings Computer Use to Codex App on Windows

Frontier Models and Workflow

• GPT-6 Astra
• Claude Fable 5.1
• Claude Projects
• Artificial Analysis Intelligence Index
• Elyx

NVIDIA PC Comparison

• GeForce RTX 5090
• Lian Li A3-mATX
• NVIDIA DGX Spark

AppStories+ Post-Show

• A preview of how Federico used local AI models to support his iOS and iPadOS 27 review.

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• Federico is @viticci everywhere
• John is @johnvoorhees`everywhere