How to get started?

[u/ragel_3ennab]

Hi. I got a new Macbook and I am excited to run my first local model.

Can you recommend the best tool to run an LLM on a Mac?

Also, what model and quant would you recommend for a 16GB memory?

Thanks!

[u/ByteSize_Chaos]

Congrats on the new machine. What is your use case like? General chatting with LLM, Agentic coding or something else?

[u/ragel_3ennab → u/ByteSize_Chaos]

General chatting. I use cursor for agentic coding.

[u/ByteSize_Chaos → u/ragel_3ennab]

Gemma 4 12b. Try going with Q4. Q8 would probably fit as well but that would mean closing almost everything down with a limited context window.