I've been waiting for a 35b of 3.8, I don't really know what the other versions are about. I'm on 5g so juggling 40gb of model files sucks. And honestly I'm sick of tweaking this stuff for no, very little, or break-it level improvements. Qwen3.6-a35b has been solid for work, just don't give it freedom to wipe your data.
I’ve heard a quantised version of flash next can fit in ~50 gb of vram (which needs a system level flag set to go over 48gb)
But the m1 cpu is itself a bottleneck on prefill compared to say an m5, there’s no real getting around it. And the 400mb/s bandwidth starts to hurt without MOE
Hoping these model optimisations can see us through to 2028 because for everything other than LLMs this hardware is still over specced and working incredibly well