Can a 48 GB MacBook replace Claude for my workshop manuals? 💻
A while back I wrote about sucatisse, my project for turning decades-old car workshop manuals into clickable, searchable, mobile-friendly things. The extraction half of that pipeline runs on cloud Claude (Opus), one batch request per page, and the structured JSON it spits out is what the site is built from. It works well. But every page costs tokens, and every page needs a network round-trip. So I spent a day on a different question. My MacBook is an M5 Pro with 48 GB of unified memory. Can it just do the whole thing itself, with no network and no per-token cost, and how close does it get to the Claude output that already ships in the S13 data? ...