Best local AI models for MacBook Pro M4 Max (128 GB)
The largest model capacity you can carry in a bag. 128 GB unified memory runs a 70B comfortably; bandwidth caps throughput below a 4090.
Trains through MLX. CUDA-only paths such as Unsloth are unavailable.
Specification
Unified memory128 GB
Usable for models96 GB
System RAM128 GB
Bandwidth546 GB/s
Local trainingSupported
Operating systemsmacos
Runs well
29 models fit this machine
Estimated
| Model | Params | Quantization | Memory | ~tok/s | Fit | Fine-tune |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Qwen2.5 72B Instruct | 72.7B | Q6_K | 60 GB | 7 | Good fit | Yes |
| Llama 3.3 70B Instruct | 70.6B | Q6_K | 58 GB | 7 | Good fit | Yes |
| Qwen2.5 Coder 32B Instruct | 32.8B | F16 | 64 GB | 6 | Good fit | Yes |
| Mixtral 8x7B Instruct | 46.7B | Q8_0 | 49 GB | 31 | Excellent fit | Yes |
| Qwen2.5 32B Instruct | 32.8B | F16 | 64 GB | 6 | Good fit | Yes |
| Gemma 3 27B Instruct | 27.4B | F16 | 57 GB | 8 | Excellent fit | Yes |
| DeepSeek-R1-Distill-Qwen-32B | 32.8B | F16 | 64 GB | 6 | Good fit | Yes |
| Phi-4 14B | 14.7B | F16 | 30 GB | 14 | Excellent fit | Yes |
| Mistral Small 24B Instruct | 23.6B | F16 | 46 GB | 9 | Excellent fit | Yes |
| Qwen2.5 14B Instruct | 14.8B | F16 | 30 GB | 14 | Excellent fit | Yes |
| Qwen3 30B-A3B | 30.5B | F16 | 58 GB | 64 | Good fit | Yes |
| StarCoder2 15B | 16B | F16 | 31 GB | 13 | Excellent fit | Yes |
| Qwen3 14B | 14.8B | F16 | 30 GB | 14 | Excellent fit | Yes |
| DeepSeek-R1-Distill-Qwen-14B | 14.8B | F16 | 30 GB | 14 | Excellent fit | Yes |
| Mistral Nemo 12B Instruct | 12.2B | F16 | 25 GB | 17 | Excellent fit | Yes |
| Qwen2.5 Coder 7B Instruct | 7.6B | F16 | 15 GB | 28 | Excellent fit | Yes |
| Gemma 3 12B Instruct | 12.2B | F16 | 26 GB | 17 | Excellent fit | Yes |
| DeepSeek-Coder-V2-Lite Instruct | 15.7B | F16 | 32 GB | 88 | Excellent fit | Yes |
Fine-tunable here
Models you can train on this machine
Qwen2.5 72B Instruct
QLORA · 45 GB peak
Llama 3.3 70B Instruct
QLORA · 44 GB peak
Qwen2.5 Coder 32B Instruct
QLORA · 22 GB peak
Mixtral 8x7B Instruct
QLORA · 28 GB peak
Qwen2.5 32B Instruct
QLORA · 22 GB peak
Gemma 3 27B Instruct
QLORA · 19 GB peak
DeepSeek-R1-Distill-Qwen-32B
QLORA · 22 GB peak
Phi-4 14B
QLORA · 12 GB peak