Can a Mac mini M6, 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$1,299
Memory32 GB, about 21 GB of it addressable by the GPU at 170 GB/s
Best model it runsQwen3.8 27B — Sonnet-class, 7 tok/s
Pay-back against the APIPays back in 17 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 | 6.9 tok/s | Sonnet-class | 19 GB | |
| Qwen3.6 27BQ4_K_M | 6.7 tok/s | Haiku-class | 19 GB | |
| Muse Glimmer 30BQ4_K_M | 7.2 tok/s | Haiku-class | 18 GB | |
| Gemma 4 26B-A4BQ4_K_M | 15 tok/s | Haiku-class | 18 GB | |
| GLM-4.7-FlashQ4_K_M | 14 tok/s | Haiku-class | 20 GB | |
| Gemma 4 12BQ4_K_M | 16 tok/s | Below every hosted tier | 8.0 GB | |
| Qwen3.5 9BQ4_K_M | 19 tok/s | Below every hosted tier | 6.8 GB | |
| MiniCPM5 2BQ4_K_M | 43 tok/s | Below every hosted tier | 3.0 GB | |
| Qwen3.5 4BQ4_K_M | 33 tok/s | Below every hosted tier | 3.8 GB | |
| Ling 3.0 tinyQ4_K_M | 21 tok/s | Below every hosted tier | 6.4 GB | |
| Granite 4.2 8BQ4_K_M | 12 tok/s | Below every hosted tier | 11 GB | |
| gpt-oss-20bMXFP4 | 18 tok/s | Below every hosted tier | 13 GB |
7 more fit; the calculator lists them all.
The specifics
- Chip
- M6 — 12-core CPU / 12-core GPU
- Memory bandwidth
- 170 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 (stand in) — Apple has not published power figures for the 2026 machines yet (support articles 103253 / 102027 stop at the 2024/2025 models). Stand-in: Apple's published maximum for the previous chip (M4 Mac mini, 65 W), which is a CPU+GPU stress figure, so it likely overstates inference draw.
- Availability
- Pre-order; ships 2026-09-22.
- Sources
- source 1, source 2, source 3