I flew from London to Google Cloud Next 2026 in Las Vegas. Ten hours with no in-flight wifi. I used the time to test how far a modern MacBook can carry engineering work on local LLMs alone. Setup A week old MacBook Pro M5 Max, 128GB unified memory, 40-core GPU. Gemma 4 31B and Qwen 4.6 36B via LM Studio. Top 100 most common docker images, top programming languages alongside with enough dependencies to build function sites with rich visualisations.