Can a Mac Studio M4 Max, 36GB run local LLMs?
Yes — 27 of the 39 open models on this site fit in its 27 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$1,999 at launch — discontinued
Memory36 GB, about 27 GB of it addressable by the GPU at 410 GB/s
Best model it runsQwen3.8 27B — Sonnet-class, 17 tok/s
Pay-back against the APIPays back in 25 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 | 17 tok/s | Sonnet-class | 19 GB | |
| Qwen3.6 27BQ4_K_M | 16 tok/s | Haiku-class | 19 GB | |
| Qwen3.6 35B-A3BQ4_K_M | 49 tok/s | Haiku-class | 23 GB | |
| Muse Glimmer 30BQ4_K_M | 17 tok/s | Haiku-class | 18 GB | |
| Gemma 4 26B-A4BQ4_K_M | 36 tok/s | Haiku-class | 18 GB | |
| Gemma 4 31B itQ4_K_M | 12 tok/s | Haiku-class | 26 GB | |
| Granite 4.2 30BQ4_K_M | 12 tok/s | Haiku-class | 26 GB | |
| GLM-4.7-FlashQ4_K_M | 35 tok/s | Haiku-class | 20 GB | |
| Gemma 4 12BQ4_K_M | 38 tok/s | Below every hosted tier | 8.0 GB | |
| Qwen3.5 9BQ4_K_M | 46 tok/s | Below every hosted tier | 6.8 GB | |
| Nemotron 3.5 Lightning 30B-A3BQ4_K_M | 47 tok/s | Below every hosted tier | 26 GB | |
| MiniCPM5 2BQ4_K_M | 104 tok/s | Below every hosted tier | 3.0 GB |
15 more fit; the calculator lists them all.
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
- source 1, source 2, source 3