Replacing gpt-oss:120b With Qwen3.6 on a MacBook Pro: A Two-Day Local Model Benchmark
TL;DR I spent two days benchmarking three Qwen3.6 variants against gpt-oss:120b on my MacBook Pro M3 Max. The shocking result: a 21 GB coding-tuned model ran an OpenClaw-shaped research-brief workload that I use for the non profit MACONA.org in 6 seconds — 10x faster than gpt-oss:120b on the same prompt. Fast enough that I now have reasonable confidence I could move this kind of work off the SaaS-hosted frontier models I have been paying for and onto local hardware on my dev machine. The deeper finding: the same local model confidently hallucinated a description of an image it could not see, with no error and no warning. Local models are ready for production agent work — at least on hardware like this. Operational asymmetries are real. Verification is not optional. ...