> It’s really hard to beat qwen coder, for role play

I am not sure if you actually tried that. Mistrals are widely asccepted go-to models for roleplay and creative writing. No Qwens are good at prose, except for their latest big Qwen 3.5.

> I don’t think their corpus is lacking in western knowledge,

It absolutely does, especially pop culture knowledge.

Apple silicon is crazy efficient as well as being comparable to GPUs in performance for max and ultra chips.

If you have the hardware to run expensive models, is the cost of electricity much of a factor? According to Google, the average price in the Silicon Valley Area is $0.448 per kWh. An RTX 5090 costs about $4,000 and has a peak power consumption of 1000 W. Maxing out that GPU for a whole year would cost $3,925 at that rate. It's not particularly more expensive than that hardware itself.

for almost the entire year, yes.