Can a Mac mini M4, 32GB run local LLMs?
Yes — 19 of the 39 open models on this site fit in its 21 GB of usable memory, the strongest being Qwen3.8 27B. Whether that saves you money is a different question, and the answer is usually no.
Price$999 at launch — discontinued
Memory32 GB, about 21 GB of it addressable by the GPU at 120 GB/s
Best model it runsQwen3.8 27B — Sonnet-class, 5 tok/s
Pay-back against the APIPays back in 13 years at 500k tokens a day
Run the numbers on this machine
What it runs
| Model | Speed | Class | Good at | Memory |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Qwen3.8 27BQ4_K_M | 4.8 tok/s | Sonnet-class | 19 GB | |
| Qwen3.6 27BQ4_K_M | 4.7 tok/s | Haiku-class | 19 GB | |
| Muse Glimmer 30BQ4_K_M | 5 tok/s | Haiku-class | 18 GB | |
| Gemma 4 26B-A4BQ4_K_M | 10 tok/s | Haiku-class | 18 GB | |
| GLM-4.7-FlashQ4_K_M | 10 tok/s | Haiku-class | 20 GB | |
| 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 |
7 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
- 21 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