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Hardware sheet

Mac with M4 Pro and 24 GB

Apple silicon24 GiB273 GB/s9.2 TFLOPS

Apple M4 Pro chip
Apple M4 Pro chip Image: Apple
Apple M4, M4 Pro and M4 Max chips
Apple M4, M4 Pro and M4 Max chips Image: Apple

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The manufacturer no longer sells this machine new. It stays in this hub because the arithmetic still answers the question if you are looking at a second-hand unit or comparing it with what is on sale today; the store no longer lists any new machine with this chip. Which one replaces it, and at what price, is in the price block further down.

Once the system takes its share, this machine leaves 21.00 GiB for the model: room for 16 of the 26 models we measure at the reference compression, and the heaviest one that fits is qwen3-coder-30b. And how fast does it answer? That’s not down to the chip, but to its 273 GB/s of memory bandwidth.

At a glanceMachine data · 2026-10-23
Left for the model21.00 GiB
Memory bandwidth273 GB/s
Models that fit16 / 26
Heaviest model it takesqwen3-coder-30b
21.00 GiB

Left for the model

Estimated

273 GB/s

Memory bandwidth

Vendor declared

16 / 26

Models that fit

Measured by Local AI Scope

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Memory

The memory you can actually use

Unified memory is shared with the operating system and everything you have open. The reserve here is deliberately conservative; you can change it in the tool.

How the memory on the box turns into memory you can use
Memory GiB
Memory on the box 24
Reserved for the system −3.00
Left for the model 21.00
What the Mac with M4 Pro and 24 GB really has free for a modelHorizontal bar of the 24 GiB of the Mac with M4 Pro and 24 GB, split into 3.0 GiB for the system, 17.3 GiB for the qwen3-coder-30b model, 1.5 GiB for the context and 2.2 GiB free.024 GiBSystem: 3.0 GiBSystem 3.0Model: 17.3 GiBModel17.3Context (8,192): 1.5 GiBContext (8,192) 1.5Headroom: 2.2 GiBHeadroom 2.2
Of the 24 GiB the machine has, 3.0 GiB never reach the model. The bar shows qwen3-coder-30b at Q4_K_M, the largest of the 26 models in the dataset that still fits at a 8,192-token context, and the KV cache that context needs — computed layer by layer, not with the usual rule of thumb.
Speed

Memory bandwidth

Two different limits, and they are easy to mix up. While the model is writing its answer, bandwidth rules: every token means reading the weights it uses again — all of them in a dense model; in a mixture of experts, the shared layers plus only the active experts — so tokens per second is roughly bandwidth divided by that amount. While the model is reading your document, compute rules: the whole input is processed at once. That is why a laptop with no GPU can take minutes before the first word appears and then type at a tolerable pace.

273 GB/s — Vendor declared · checked against the manufacturer’s page on 2026-08-25 (Source).

Compute: 9.2 TFLOPS (estimate for this class of machine) — Estimated · the manufacturer does not publish this figure at all; ours is a conservative estimate, not a specification. The figures in this line do not all come from the same measure across machines, because each manufacturer publishes a different one. Compare them between machines only with that in mind.

Fit

Which models fit here, and which do not

Fitting means three things at once fit in the memory left over: the model file, its context memory, and the runtime’s working headroom. Context memory is computed from each model’s declared attention pattern layer by layer, not from the generic formula — which is why several models fit here that the generic formula would rule out.

Every measured model against this machine: size, whether it fits at each context, and the largest context it holds
Model Compression shown Model size 8k 32k 128k Largest context that fits
qwen3-1.7b Q4_K_M 1.03 GiB yes yes — 32k
qwen3-4b-2507 Q4_K_M 2.33 GiB yes yes no 64k
gemma4-e2b Q4_K_M 2.89 GiB yes yes yes 128k
gemma4-e4b Q4_K_M 4.63 GiB yes yes yes 128k
qwen3-8b Q4_K_M 4.68 GiB yes yes — 32k
granite-4.2-8b Q4_K_M 4.98 GiB yes yes no 64k
qwen3.5-9b Q4_K_M 5.29 GiB yes yes yes 256k
gemma4-12b Q4_K_M 6.63 GiB yes yes yes 256k
gpt-oss-20b Q4_K_M 10.83 GiB yes yes yes 128k
mistral-small-24b Q4_K_M 13.35 GiB yes yes no 32k
qwen3.8-27b Q4_K_M 15.33 GiB yes yes no 32k
muse-glimmer-30b Q4_K_M 15.61 GiB yes yes yes 128k
qwen3.6-27b Q4_K_M 15.66 GiB yes yes no 32k
gemma4-26b-a4b Q4_K_M 15.78 GiB yes yes no 64k
gemma4-31b Q4_K_M 17.07 GiB yes no no 16k
qwen3-coder-30b Q4_K_M 17.28 GiB yes no no 16k
qwen3.6-35b-a3b Q4_K_M 20.61 GiB no no no —
flint-40b Q4_K_M 23.61 GiB no no no —
nemotron-3.5-lightning-30b Q4_K_M 23.73 GiB no no no —
gpt-oss-120b Q4_K_M 58.46 GiB no no no —
llama4-scout-17b Q4_K_M 60.87 GiB no no no —
nemotron-3.5-super-120b Q4_K_M 65.29 GiB no no no —
qwen3.8-flash-next IQ4_XS 87.25 GiB no no no —
deepseek-v4-flash IQ4_XS 127.28 GiB no no no —
glm-5.3-flash Q4_K_M 187.04 GiB no no no —
glm-5.2 Q4_K_M 433.83 GiB no no no —

Sizes are the real published files at the reference compression, one step per row: Q4_K_M where the author publishes it, the nearest neighbour where they do not. Every row states which one it is showing. Q4_K_M is our quality floor: below it the loss is audible in the answers. A model that would only fit here at a harsher compression is listed as not fitting, on purpose. A dash in a context column means the model itself does not offer that context, so there is nothing to fit.

Models that fit — 16 of the 26 models measured

Models that do not fit — 10 of the 26 models measured

Willing to compress a bit more? Then not everything on this list is out of reach. In the 21.00 GiB of unified memory left for the model, qwen3.6-35b-a3b runs at Q4_K_S (19.46 GiB) with up to 16k tokens of context; flint-40b runs at Q3_K_M (18.19 GiB) with up to 32k tokens of context, and nemotron-3.5-lightning-30b runs at IQ4_XS (17.62 GiB) with up to 64k tokens of context. Below the compression in the table a model loses quality, and at Q3_K_M noticeably more; that is why our count sticks to the table.

The machines on either side

Price

Price and availability

What a machine costs decides as much as what fits inside it, so the price belongs on this page. What follows is only what the manufacturer publishes, with the market it applies to and the day it was read.

There is no price: this row is a class of machine, not a single product with a price list.

Apple no longer sells any new Mac with an M4 Pro: as of 19 September 2026 the store offers M6 and M5 Pro in the Mac mini, and M5, M5 Pro and M5 Max in the MacBook Pro. So there is no current manufacturer price for this class — the closest machine on sale with more than 24 GB within reach is the Mac mini with M5 Pro, from $1,699.

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