Can a Mac mini M4, 24GB run local LLMs?
Yes — 13 of the 39 open models on this site fit in its 16 GB of usable memory, the strongest being Gemma 4 12B. Whether that saves you money is a different question, and the answer is usually no.
Price$799 at launch — discontinued
Memory24 GB, about 16 GB of it addressable by the GPU at 120 GB/s
Best model it runsGemma 4 12B — Below every hosted tier, 11 tok/s
Pay-back against the APIPays back in 66 years at 500k tokens a day
Run the numbers on this machine
What it runs
| Model | Speed | Class | Good at | Memory |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Gemma 4 12BQ4_K_M | 11 tok/s | Below every hosted tier | 8.0 GB | |
| Qwen3.5 9BQ4_K_M | 13 tok/s | Below every hosted tier | 6.8 GB | |
| MiniCPM5 2BQ4_K_M | 30 tok/s | Below every hosted tier | 3.0 GB | |
| Qwen3.5 4BQ4_K_M | 24 tok/s | Below every hosted tier | 3.8 GB | |
| Ling 3.0 tinyQ4_K_M | 15 tok/s | Below every hosted tier | 6.4 GB | |
| Granite 4.2 8BQ4_K_M | 8.4 tok/s | Below every hosted tier | 11 GB | |
| gpt-oss-20bMXFP4 | 12 tok/s | Below every hosted tier | 13 GB | |
| Gemma 4 E4BQAT Q4_0 | 10 tok/s | Below every hosted tier | 5.7 GB | |
| LFM2.5 2.6BQ4_K_M | 41 tok/s | Below every hosted tier | 2.2 GB | |
| Ministral 3 14BQ4_K_M | 6.6 tok/s | Below every hosted tier | 14 GB | |
| Ministral 3 8BQ4_K_M | 9.2 tok/s | Below every hosted tier | 9.8 GB | |
| Ornith 1.5 9BQ4_K_M | 13 tok/s | not yet placed | 6.9 GB |
1 more fit; the calculator lists them all.
The specifics
- Chip
- M4 — 10-core CPU / 10-core GPU
- Memory bandwidth
- 120 GB/s
- Usable by the GPU
- 16 GB — macOS lets the GPU wire roughly two-thirds of unified memory by default (llama.cpp discussion #2182: 66.7% at 32 GiB or less, 75% above). Raise it with `sudo sysctl iogpu.wired_limit_mb`. Memory is treated as GB throughout, which is slightly conservative.
- Power under load
- 65 W (published) — Apple's published 'max' figure for this chip (support article 103253), a CPU+GPU stress number; inference typically draws less.
- Availability
- Discontinued 2026-08-25. Launch price; Apple no longer sells it new, so treat as a refurbished/used reference.
- Sources
- source 1, source 2, source 3