Would a MacBook M5 16/24/32GB be an upgrade, complement, or waste next to my RTX 4060 laptop?

Hi everyone,

I’m trying to understand whether buying a future/possible MacBook M5 with 16GB, 24GB, or 32GB unified memory would make sense for my local AI workflow, or whether it would mostly be a waste given my current setup.

My main machine is:

Acer Nitro laptop

RTX 4060 Laptop GPU, 8GB VRAM

Intel i7-13620H

32GB RAM

Around 1.5TB SSD

Windows 11, with WSL2/Linux available

My current/desired local AI use cases are:

Running local LLMs through LM Studio, Ollama, llama.cpp, etc.

RAG over legal/jurisprudence documents

Transcription with faster-whisper

Document processing and summarization

Possible local agents / automation

Maybe voice assistant experiments

General AI tinkering without relying entirely on cloud APIs

I understand that the RTX 4060’s 8GB VRAM is the main limitation for larger models, but it is still a real NVIDIA GPU and works well with many local AI tools. On the other hand, Apple Silicon has unified memory, great efficiency, battery life, and seems attractive for running larger quantized models that do not fit in 8GB VRAM.

My question is: would an M5 MacBook with 16GB, 24GB, or 32GB unified memory actually improve my local LLM experience in a meaningful way?

More specifically:

1. Would a 16GB M5 be pointless for local LLMs compared to my RTX 4060 laptop?

2. Is 24GB unified memory enough to make the MacBook a useful complement?

3. Is 32GB the minimum where Apple Silicon starts to make real sense for local LLMs?

4. Would the MacBook be better as a secondary portable/efficient machine rather than a replacement?

5. For my use case, would I be better off spending the money on a desktop GPU with more VRAM instead?

6. Are there workflows where the MacBook + RTX 4060 laptop combination makes sense, or would I just be duplicating capabilities?

I’m not trying to train large models. I mostly care about inference, RAG, document workflows, transcription, and experimentation.

I’d especially appreciate opinions from people who have both an NVIDIA 8GB VRAM laptop and an Apple Silicon Mac with 16–32GB unified memory.

Is the MacBook a real improvement, a nice complement, or just not worth it for this setup?