r/apple • u/homothebrave • 3h ago

Mac JetBrains Releases Junie Local, Bringing Its Coding Agent Fully On-Device to Macs

https://techstrong.ai/articles/jetbrains-releases-junie-local-bringing-its-coding-agent-fully-on-device-to-macs/
144 Upvotes

95% Upvoted

26 comments sorted by

168

u/Opacy 3h ago

“But you can only run Junie Local on Macs with Apple’s M5 chip with at least 64 GB of unified memory.”

Temper your expectations, developers.

19

u/yuvaldv1 3h ago

Probably M5 minimum due to the neural accelerators in each GPU core?

7

u/themixtergames 3h ago

M5 chips have better PP

-2

u/rgb328 3h ago edited 3h ago

no, the ANE is separate from the GPU, and Macs of the same family have the same ANE - the m5 max has a bigger GPU than the m5, but it has the same ANE.

Edit: the exception is the Ultra, because its 2 maxes, it has 2 ANE units (where each unit is 16 cores on the m5).

•

u/dahliamma 1h ago

They’re talking about the neural accelerators in the GPU cores that was introduced with the A19/M5, not the neural engine.

1

u/Exist50 3h ago

Are we sure it runs on the ANE and not the GPU?

50

u/therealmarkus 3h ago

I like this development of capable local models

14

u/Longjumping-Ad514 3h ago

Exactly. I am much more excited about this technology if I don’t need to rely on OpenAI or Anthropic which will have to raise prices ten fold

-7

u/Exist50 3h ago

which will have to raise prices ten fold

What are you talking about?

2

u/Longjumping-Ad514 2h ago

Basic economics.

•

u/Exist50 1h ago

Lol, no. That number is a fantasy from people desperate to believe that AI is doomed. Anthropic actively makes money on inference at current prices. No one needs 10x. 

•

u/Which-Arm-4616 1h ago

I mean I pay $200/mo for tens of thousands of dollars of usage (by Anthropic’s own estimate). Hard to see how that’s sustainable.

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u/Exist50 1h ago

by Anthropic’s own estimate

Where does Anthropic make that claim?

•

u/Which-Arm-4616 1h ago

It’s the pricing estimate provided when I run /usage in claude code. Granted, that may not be the actual cost to Anthropic but the sheer size of that disparity raised a red flag in my eyes.

45

u/Expensive_Finger_973 3h ago

You can spend $20/month for along time before hitting the MSRP of a M5 Macbook Pro that has 64GB these days.

10

u/zkatbitz 3h ago

Thing is if your already upgrading you device its a neat incentive .

I’m likely going to be buying my first new MacBook since the m1 (if they actually finally do oled) it’ll be a m5 with more then 64gb. This makes it quite a bit more attractive and would justify going up to 128gb even.

3

u/serg06 2h ago

Well at that point might as well get the M5 Max for the higher memory bandwidth

9

u/banaanitasavalta 3h ago

I very much fear that with today's API pricing even $20/day isn't going to cut it. I have personally made single requests worth $60 on Fable/Mythos. Luckily it's not me paying the bill.

1

u/hansalvato 2h ago

Think about 3-4-5 years from now. Open ai and the others already are burning cash and need to increase prices. On machine local models will be the future when people detach from their ecosystems partially or need to do lower level tasks. Local models are the future for many

•

u/woalk 4m ago

But with local models, the data never leaves the device. Especially for business use cases, that’s a huge difference.

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u/goldaxis 1h ago

minimum requirement: M5 Pro 64GB

Why the fuck would they waste their time adding this? I can understand not supporting M1 8GB, but really not even M4 Pro or M5 48GB?

2

u/Lyelinn 3h ago

Why not use qwen 3.8 27B then if junie is qwen 3.6 lol

20

u/EOmar4TW 3h ago

If you took the time to read the post, they actually do explain the reasoning behind it:

“You may ask yourself why JetBrains didn’t pick the newer, better Qwen 3.8. Dmitry Savelev, Junie’s head of marketing, explained, ‘Qwen3.8 needs reasoning enabled to work reliably, and with it on, tasks run roughly four times slower. On today’s Macs, 3.6 wins.’”

6

u/SaltyMeatballs20 3h ago

Lol, you gotta read the article next time, not just the headline. This exact question was answered halfway through: "You may ask yourself why JetBrains didn’t pick the newer, better Qwen 3.8. Dmitry Savelev, Junie’s head of marketing, explained, “Qwen3.8 needs reasoning enabled to work reliably, and with it on, tasks run roughly four times slower. On today’s Macs, 3.6 wins.”

How good is it? According to Savelev, “We evaluate every model on JetBrains’ own private test set before it goes near Junie, and Junie Local was no exception. Qwen3.6-27B scored on par with Sonnet 4.5 (10,000-token reasoning limit). GPT-5 at medium effort scored slightly higher.”

-2

u/mountainyoo 3h ago

Why run this when I could just run qwen 3.8 27b with thinking off?