For light Hermes use, laptop limits matter more than specs alone
The target use is basic AI chat for genealogy work, file sorting and , extracting data from documents, research, and similar non-coding tasks. The available devices are a MacBook Air M1 with 16GB of memory and an HP EliteBook with 32GB of memory.
The HP has an AMD Ryzen 5 PRO 2500U and Radeon Vega Mobile Gfx, but it will likely run most on the CPU, with limited shared VRAM. That means both machines are better suited to smaller .
The MacBook Air M1 may be able to run , but could become very slow. Claude, Codex, Goose, and Hermes are all being tested, while Ollama is the main tool for running .
Key points
- The work is everyday research and document handling, not coding.
- The choice is between a 16GB MacBook Air M1 and a 32GB HP EliteBook.
- The HP may depend mostly on the CPU, so its extra memory may not make fast.
- The MacBook Air M1 can try , but may drop sharply.
- Ollama is the tool, alongside Claude, Codex, Goose, and Hermes.