I don’t think you need a 10-30b model for most smartphone use cases.
But I meant to counter gp’s claim that “I can run a 27b model on an iPhone” is kind of pointless and disingenuous. Yes I’m sure someone will come up with a way to run a “27b model” at 0.1 bit quantization on an Apple Watch pretty soon misses the whole point of saying a model is “27b” in capability.
Achieving a parameter count is not the point. And is almost meaningless
We're too easily conflating parameter count with capability. That Bonsai 27B you're running is at 2-bit quantization. Is it really better than the best 10-18B models?
That $6700 is a $5000 upgrade over a base model Macbook Pro.
$5000 in US Treasuries (currently at 4.89%) yields $244.5/yr. That's more than enough to cover the annual Claude Pro subscription ($200/yr) which includes Claude Code with lots of Sonnet usage (far better than Qwen 3.6)
And here we are.