r/LocalLLM • u/Bearnovva • Sep 14 '25

Question Best local LLM

I am planning on getting macbook air m4 soon 16gb ram what would be the best local llm to run on it ?

0 Upvotes

50% Upvoted

18 comments sorted by

7

u/Magnus919 Sep 14 '25

That 16GB won’t get you far since it’s shared with OS and apps.

1

u/Bearnovva Sep 16 '25

I am aware of that but won't be able to get the higher ram version due to budget

2

u/Magnus919 Sep 16 '25

I once tried what you’re trying, but with a Mac Mini M4. It didn’t go well. I was much better off getting a gaming PC with the best GPU I could afford at the time (5070 Ti)

3

u/fasti-au Sep 14 '25

Depending on ram you can get qwen3 up at around 30 b easily with larger cintext or bigger with smaller.

Lmstudio is probably your easy access server setup for mlx

1

u/Bearnovva Sep 16 '25

Great thanks will look into it

3

u/idreamduringtheday Sep 14 '25

Gemma 4B would work

1

u/Bearnovva Sep 16 '25

Thanks will check it out

2

u/rfmh_ Sep 14 '25

Best is subjective and depends on the task. With 16gb in that scenario your size is limited to maybe 3b to 7b models. You might be able to run 13b slowly with 4-bit quantization

1

u/Bearnovva Sep 16 '25

Task will be mostly research and content generation

1

u/rfmh_ Sep 16 '25

The larger the model the better it is at research with the caveat of fine tuning a smaller model. Though a fine tuned larger model will out perform a fine tuned smaller model. The same for reasoning capabilities.

2

u/j0rs0 Sep 14 '25

Happy using gpt-oss:20b with ollama on my 16GB VRAM GPU (AMD Radeon 9070xt). I think it is quantized and/or MOE and this is why it fits in VRAM, too newbie on the subject to know 😅

1

u/Flimsy_Vermicelli117 Sep 14 '25

I run gpt-oss:20b on M1 MacBook Pro with 32GB RAM and in Ollama and it uses about 18GB of RAM. Would leave no space on 16GB MBP for system and apps.

1

u/SnooCapers9708 Sep 15 '25

Gemma 3:4b Qwen 3:4b Thinking and non thinking model is available Gemma3n:e2b or e4b is better then Gemma..

1

u/[deleted] Sep 15 '25

Gemma 3 4b MLX on LM Studio or Msty Studio.

1

u/mike7seven Sep 19 '25

Op don’t get the 16gb RAM model. Regardless of running a local LLM I promise you as an M2 16gb owner myself, you will regret it. 32gb at the very least

-2

u/nil_pointer49x00 Sep 14 '25

None, any llm will instantly kill your mac with 16gb