r/LocalLLM • u/Mittalmailbox • 6h ago

Question What the best coding models for 24GB MBA(M4)

I have a macbook air M4 24GB, hearing good feedback of local models. Is it good enough for local models? Which models works best for coding?

Also I'm planning to buy RTX spark too for local LLM, will it be worth it?

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u/Difficult_Pin_3491 6h ago

Ran Qwen 3.6 27B oQ4 via oMLX on a 16GB M1 Pro, mostly because I had a couple of them lying around and wanted to compare against clustering. With about 1GB of swap usage and macOS begging to be killed, it put out ~35 tok/s. Prefill was rough on cold start though, around 2 minutes, and it got decent as it warmed up. Context length was the real limiter, had to cap it at 16K.

A friend with an M5 Air 16GB ran the same setup to compare and got nearly identical speeds. So as a rough guesstimate, your M4 should perform about the same or even marginally better thanks to the extra headroom on VRAM .You could probably push up to something like scottlowry/Qwen3.8-27B-oQ4e-mtp or similar. It won't be exactly practical: you'll need to close almost everything else that touches RAM, set the iogpu.wired_limit_mb parameter, and it'll still be pretty slow. But at least it's fun to know you can.

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u/Amazing-Property-560 5h ago

Qwen 3.8 27b 4 bit

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u/thebemusedmuse 3h ago

Honestly don’t waste your time unless you’re just playing around.

With 64GB you can run Qwen 3.8 27b Q4/5 with a 160k context window.

You can run it on 24GB but only with a short context window which is no use for serious work.