MacBook Air (M4, 16 GB) — Local LLM Performance

MacBook Air (M4, 16 GB) is a Laptop running macOS, with 16 GB unified memory.

Specifications

Memory for models	16 GB unified
Memory bandwidth	120 GB/s
Memory upgradeable	No — soldered, decided at purchase
Chip	Apple M4
Architecture	ARM, 3nm TSMC
Form factor	Laptop
Operating system	macOS
Released	2024
Llama 3.1 8B Q4_K_M	7.7–16 tok/s

Worth knowing before you buy

• Fanless: sustained generation throttles on long runs in a way the same chip in a MacBook Pro does not.
• 16 GB unified memory is shared with the OS and every open app.

Models on the MacBook Air M4 16 GB

• Yi 1.5 Family — Yes, but it is tight
• VibeThinker — Yes — comfortably
• Aya 3B (Tiny Aya) — Yes — comfortably
• StarCoder 2 — Yes
• SmolLM3 — Yes — comfortably
• SmolLM2 — Yes — comfortably
• Qwen3-Coder — Yes
• Qwen3.8 — Yes, but it is tight
• Qwen 3.6 — Yes, but it is tight
• Qwen 3.5 — Yes, but it is tight
• Qwen 3 — Yes, but it is tight
• Qwen 2.5 VL — Yes
• Qwen 2.5 Family — Yes, but it is tight
• Phi-4 Mini — Yes — comfortably
• Phi-4 Family — Yes, but it is tight
• Phi 3.5 Family — Yes — comfortably
• OLMo 2 — Yes, but it is tight
• Mistral Small 3.1 — Yes
• Mistral Small 3.2 — Yes
• Mistral Family — Yes, but it is tight
• Ministral — Yes
• Ministral 3 — Yes
• Magistral Small — Yes
• Llama 3.2 Vision — Yes
• Llama 3.2 Family — Yes
• Llama 3.1 Family — Yes
• InternLM 3 — Yes
• IBM Granite 4.1 — Yes
• Granite 3.0 — Yes
• GPT-OSS — Yes
• GLM-6 — Yes, but it is tight
• GLM-5 / GLM-5.1 — Yes, but it is tight
• GLM-4.7 / GLM-Z1 — Yes, but it is tight
• Gemma 4 — Yes, but it is tight
• Gemma 3n — Yes
• Gemma 3 — Yes, but it is tight
• Gemma 2 Family — Yes, but it is tight
• Falcon 3 — Yes
• EXAONE 3.5 — Yes
• Devstral — Yes, but it is tight
• DeepSeek R1 — Yes
• Cosmos 3 — Yes, but it is tight
• Cogito v1 — Yes, but it is tight
• Codestral — Yes
• Bonsai 27B — Yes, but it is tight
• BitNet b1.58 — Yes — comfortably
• Aya Expanse — Yes

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