Running Local LLMs Offline on a Ten-Hour Flight

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.
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