Qwen 3.6 vs gpt-oss:120b on M3 Max: I Ran a Harder Test, the 8× Speed Gap Surprised Me
TL;DR I published a post last week about replacing gpt-oss:120b with Qwen 3.6 on my MacBook Pro M3 Max. The numbers in that post were real, but one set of tests was structurally gameable — 38 of 40 baseline images were the same class, so an “always-say-A” stub also scored 95 percent. I went back, designed three un-gameable reasoning tasks, and ran them against both local models on identical hardware. gpt-oss:120b finished the three tasks in 137 seconds. qwen3.6:27b-q8_0 took 1593 seconds — 11.6 times slower, on the same M3 Max, for the same prompts and essentially the same answers. This post is the methodology, the receipts, and the honest correction to the migration narrative. ...