Getting started with LM Studio on macOS — model recommendations?

Hey everyone, I’m new to LM Studio and looking for some guidance on how to get started.

What models do you recommend for:

I’m still figuring out the best way to use local models efficiently, so any tips, setups, or workflows are very welcome.

Thanks in advance!

My setup:

Model Name: MacBook Pro
Chip: Apple M5 Pro
Total Number of Cores: 18 (6 Super and 12 Performance)
Memory: 48 GB

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Check of Qwen 3.5 series. There are decent.

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Try to run MLX models when you can, LM Studio supports it and it usually gives significant boost in performance on Appple Silicon

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Qwen3.5 37B is currently the best dense mid size model I've got for those workloads.

I tried Gemma 4 and it doesn't compete on scripting, coding or writing instruction sets.

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Gemma doesn't do it forbme too. Qwen is good at reasoning too, it probably my favorite right now

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Qwen and gml

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What models do you recommend for:

automation workflows
Some bigger model with reasoning
coding
qwen is good
productivity
not sure what do you mean by that
web research
well, I guess this you will have to delegate to some your local service or some external 3rd api. Model itself can't do websearch. You can do some tools for that and then model will know what to do when requested
image generation
it wont be LLM then. Check ComfyUI for image generation