Best local AI models for MacBook Pro M1 Pro (16 GB)

Runs 7B models well. 16 GB shared with the OS leaves about 12 GB for a model.

Specification

Unified memory16 GB

Usable for models12 GB

System RAM16 GB

Bandwidth200 GB/s

Local trainingNot practical

Operating systemsmacos

Runs well

27 models fit this machine

Estimated

Model	Params	Quantization	Memory	~tok/s	Fit	Fine-tune
Qwen2.5 Coder 7B Instruct	7.6B	Q6_K	6.8 GB	25	Excellent fit	Yes
Mistral Nemo 12B Instruct	12.2B	Q4_K_M	9.1 GB	21	Good fit	Yes
Qwen2.5 7B Instruct	7.6B	Q6_K	6.8 GB	25	Excellent fit	Yes
Llama 3.1 8B Instruct	8B	Q4_K_M	6.1 GB	32	Excellent fit	Yes
Gemma 2 9B Instruct	9.2B	Q5_K_M	9.0 GB	24	Good fit	Yes
Mistral 7B Instruct v0.3	7.25B	Q5_K_M	6.4 GB	30	Excellent fit	Yes
Phi-4 14B	14.7B	Q4_K_M	11 GB	17	Tight fit	Yes
Qwen2.5 14B Instruct	14.8B	Q4_K_M	11 GB	17	Tight fit	Yes
Qwen3 8B	8.2B	Q6_K	8.0 GB	23	Good fit	Yes
StarCoder2 15B	16B	Q4_K_M	10 GB	16	Tight fit	No
Code Llama 7B Instruct	6.7B	Q5_K_M	9.0 GB	33	Good fit	Yes
Qwen3 14B	14.8B	Q4_K_M	10 GB	17	Tight fit	Yes
DeepSeek-R1-Distill-Qwen-14B	14.8B	Q4_K_M	11 GB	17	Tight fit	Yes
Phi-3.5 Mini Instruct	3.8B	Q6_K	6.4 GB	50	Excellent fit	Yes
Gemma 3 4B Instruct	4.3B	Q6_K	5.1 GB	44	Excellent fit	Yes
Gemma 3 12B Instruct	12.2B	Q4_K_M	10 GB	21	Tight fit	Yes
DeepSeek-Coder-V2-Lite Instruct	15.7B	Q4_K_M	11 GB	107	Tight fit	Yes
Llama 3.2 3B Instruct	3.2B	Q8_0	4.6 GB	45	Excellent fit	Yes

Fine-tunable here

QLORA · 7.0 GB peak

QLORA · 10 GB peak