HARDWARE / UNIFIED MEMORY
Apple silicon · 16 GB
A polished 4B–8B local experience when the OS and apps have enough headroom.
M-series notebook16 GB
01 / PRACTICAL CEILING
Qwen3 14B
The highest listed result may be a tight or offloaded fit. For daily use, prefer the first result marked Comfortable and keep context modest.
02 / DEFAULT RUNTIME
MLX LM
Native Apple silicon inference, experimentation and fine-tuning. Only for Apple silicon. Use an MLX-converted model and tune KV cache size for long contexts.
Open guide03 / MODEL ENVELOPE
Representative open-weight models
Alibaba Qwen
Qwen3 14B
14BGGUF Q4
- Estimated memory
- ~11.2 GB
- Context
- 32K+
Google
Gemma 3 12B
12BINT4
- Estimated memory
- ~9.4 GB
- Context
- 128K
Alibaba Qwen
Qwen3 8B
8BGGUF Q4
- Estimated memory
- ~6.8 GB
- Context
- 32K+
Alibaba Qwen
Qwen3 4B
4BGGUF Q4
- Estimated memory
- ~3.6 GB
- Context
- 32K+
Google
Gemma 3 4B
4BINT4 / GGUF Q4
- Estimated memory
- ~4.2 GB
- Context
- 128K
Meta
Llama 3.2 3B
3BGGUF Q4
- Estimated memory
- ~2.8 GB
- Context
- 128K
Watch out
Fit is based on estimated total model memory. Driver support, KV cache, multimodal projectors, concurrency, and desktop applications can all reduce available headroom. Current fit: Qwen3 14B (Tight), Gemma 3 12B (Tight), Qwen3 8B (Comfortable), Qwen3 4B (Comfortable), Gemma 3 4B (Comfortable), Llama 3.2 3B (Comfortable).