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What Is the Best Local LLM for Mac in 2026? (M1 to M6)
A 2021 M1 Pro writes answers faster than a new M5 Air. The best model for every Mac from 8GB to 512GB, plus voice, embeddings and image.
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On October 15, Meta released Muse Spark Open, its biggest open model, and said it was built to run on Macs. Meta’s own setup uses two Mac Studios with 512GB of memory each, on a version of Apple’s top chip that isn’t on sale yet.
The Macs people search about are much smaller, like a 16GB MacBook Air or a 24GB Mac mini. They run good models too, but which one depends on the Mac in ways that aren’t obvious. A 2021 M1 Pro writes answers faster than a new M5 Air. And on a 24GB Mac, the same Qwen model writes 9 tokens a second in its standard download and 50 in a slightly smaller one.
Chat is only part of it. Speech to text, reading text aloud, searching your own files and making images each have a best model for a Mac as well.
So what should you run on the Mac you have, and what’s worth adding next to it.
This was originally published on The Whiteboard, my Substack. If you’ve been reading me for a while and…
