Can a Mac Studio M4 Max, 36GB run local LLMs?

Yes — 32 of the 48 current models on this site fit in its 27 GB of usable memory. The strongest it holds, Qwen3.8 27B, runs at 17 tok/s with a 32k window, worked out from memory bandwidth. Whether that saves you money is a different question: at its $1,999 launch price and 500k tokens a day, it pays back in 123 years.

Run the numbers on this machine

What the Mac Studio M4 Max, 36GB runs

They do not all hold the same window. The weights are a fixed size, but the key-value cache grows with every token you keep, so what is left of 27 GB after the weights is how far the context goes. On 6 of the 12 below, this machine's memory is what runs out first: Granite 4.2 30B stops soonest, at 32k. The rest reach 256k, where the calculator's list ends, or the longest setting their own context limit allows.

Speed and memory are at 32k context, the setting the calculator starts on; the memory column is the weights plus the cache for that much of it. Each speed says how it was arrived at, and every one here is estimated from this machine's 410 GB/s of memory bandwidth rather than taken from a published benchmark. There is a page on how that sum works, and what each size needs, and one on what 36 GB runs, machine by machine. The longest context is the longest setting the calculator offers that this machine still holds the model at, cache included, and each one opens the calculator on that model at that length. A figure tagged memory is one this machine ran out of room for, and the rest are stopped by the model's own limit or by the end of the list.

For scale, the calculator starts from 80 tok/s for a hosted API and times a local machine against it. Nothing above reaches it, and the quickest is 49 tok/s.

20 more fit. Ranked below the twelve above: MiniCPM5 2B, Qwen3.5 4B, Ling 3.0 tiny, Granite 4.2 8B, Qwen3-Coder 30B-A3B, gpt-oss-20b, Gemma 4 E4B, LFM2.5 2.6B, Devstral Small 2 24B, Ministral 3 14B, Ministral 3 8B. The other 9 have no intelligence-index score, so the ranking cannot place them: Laguna XS 2.1, LFM3 1.7B, Ornith 1.5 9B, Ornith 1.5 35B-A3B, Spark-X2.5 4B, Spark-X2.6 4B, KAT-Coder V2.5 Dev 35B-A3B, LFM2.5 24B-A2B, Flint 40B-A2.5B. Their pages show what each one needs and what runs it.

The 48 counted above are the current models. This site prices 16 superseded ones as well, because people still run them, and this machine holds eight of those at 32k, strongest first: Qwen3 30B-A3B Instruct 2507, Llama 3.1 8B Instruct at Q4_K_M, Llama 3.1 8B Instruct at Q8_0, Mistral Small 3.2 24B Instruct, Qwen3 14B, Qwen3 8B, Gemma 3 27B it, Gemma 3 12B it. Each of those pages asks whether the model is still worth running.

Other machines to weigh against the Mac Studio M4 Max, 36GB

Every row uses the same defaults as the figures above: 500k tokens a day at 15:1 input to output, 32k context, and each machine's strongest model that fits, counted against the same 48 current models. The GeForce RTX 5090, 32GB is priced as the card alone, so add the PC around it before comparing it with a complete computer. All seven cards here are ranked by what each one holds.

Head to head with the machine that replaced it: Mac Studio M5 Max, 36GB. There are 111 machine match-ups on the site.

The specifics

Chip

M4 Max — 14-core CPU / 32-core GPU

Memory bandwidth

410 GB/s

Usable by the GPU

27 GB — macOS lets the GPU wire roughly 75% 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

145 W (published) — Apple's published 'max' figure for this chip (support article 102027), a CPU+GPU stress number; inference typically draws less. Apple measured the 14-core/32-GPU config.

Availability

Discontinued 2026-08-25. Launch price; Apple no longer sells it new, so treat as a refurbished/used reference.

Sources

Apple Support, Apple Support, Low End Mac