Local LLMs in 2026: What Actually Works on Consumer Hardware

An honest map of the local LLM landscape as of May 2026. Three hardware lanes (CPU, RTX 4090, Apple Silicon), the models that matter (Qwen 3, Llama 3.3, Phi-4, Mistral, DeepSeek-R1), the stack (Ollama, llama.cpp, vLLM, LocalAI, MLX-LM), quantization in 60 seconds, plus actual tokens-per-second numbers.