Can I Run Phi-4 Mini on MacBook Air (M4, 16 GB)?

作者： Jakub Rusinowski · 最后更新： 2025年2月4日

Yes — comfortably

Yes, comfortably — Phi-4 Mini (3.8B) at Q8_0 needs about 5.9 GB of the 12 GB usable on MacBook Air (M4, 16 GB), leaving ~6.1 GB spare and running at ~13.8 tok/s (estimated), with room for about 32,768 tokens of context.

Confidence: high · Recommended quantization: Q8_0 · Estimated speed: ~13.8 tok/s

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MacBook Air (M4, 16 GB) — what it gives a model

Usable memory for models	12 GB
Memory bandwidth	120 GB/s
Form factor	Laptop
Operating system	macOS
Memory upgradeable	No — soldered

Phi-4 Mini on MacBook Air (M4, 16 GB): memory by quantization

Quant	Memory needed	Fits 12 GB?	Max context	Est. speed	Download
F16	9.5 GB	✓ Yes	16K	~7.9 tok/s	7.6 GB
Q8_0	5.9 GB	✓ Yes	32K	~13.8 tok/s	4 GB
Q6_K	5 GB	✓ Yes	32K	~17.1 tok/s	3.1 GB
Q5_K_M	4.6 GB	✓ Yes	32K	~19.2 tok/s	2.7 GB
Q4_K_M	4.2 GB	✓ Yes	64K	~21.7 tok/s	2.3 GB
Q3_K_M	3.5 GB	✓ Yes	64K	~27.9 tok/s	1.6 GB
Q2_K	3.1 GB	✓ Yes	64K	~33.2 tok/s	1.2 GB

What to watch out for

Memory on this machine is not upgradeable, so the configuration you buy is the ceiling for every model you will ever run on it.

MacBook Air M4 16 GB limitations

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.

Recommended setup

Ollama or LM Studio (Metal) — MLX for the fastest Apple-native throughput

How these numbers are calculated

Memory need = quantized weights + KV cache at 8,192 tokens (f16) + 0.8 GB runtime overhead.
16 GB unified memory at 120 GB/s, shared between CPU and GPU.
macOS reserves a share of unified memory for the system, so not all of it is available to a model.
Throughput is a memory-bandwidth roofline estimate, not a measurement. It is labelled "estimated" everywhere it appears.
KV cache is computed from this model's published attention configuration.

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