How fast will local models feel on the MacBook M4 Pro 24GB?

Local LLM speed on the MacBook M4 Pro 24GB

The MacBook M4 Pro 24GB has 24 GB of unified memory and 273 GB/s of memory bandwidth, which is what mostly decides generation speed. Below is the expected speed for each model at the best quantization that fits.

ModelQuantizationMemoryGenerationFirst token
Qwen 3.6/3.8 27BQ4_K_MFits8.4 tok/s0.7 s
GLM-5.3 FlashUD-IQ1_SDoesn't fitWon't run—
GPT-OSS 20BMXFP4Fits68 tok/s0.4 s
Gemma 4 26B A4BQ4_K_MFits57 tok/s0.4 s
Qwen 3.5/3.6 35B A3BQ4_K_MDoesn't fitWon't run—
Ornith 1.5 35B A3BQ4_K_MDoesn't fitWon't run—
DeepSeek V4 FlashUD-IQ1_SDoesn't fitWon't run—
GPT-OSS 120BMXFP4Doesn't fitWon't run—
Gemma 4 31BQ4_K_MDoesn't fitWon't run—
Llama 3.1 8BQ4_K_MFits33 tok/s0.4 s
Qwen 3.5 9BQ4_K_MFits23 tok/s0.5 s
DeepSeek R1 Distill 14BQ4_K_MFits18 tok/s0.5 s
Ornith 1.5 9BQ4_K_MFits22 tok/s0.5 s
Muse Glimmer 30BQ4_K_MDoesn't fitWon't run—
Qwen3 30B A3BQ4_K_MDoesn't fitWon't run—

Other hardware

Estimates for a short prompt on a single device. Measured numbers come from community benchmarks (r/LocalLLaMA, localscore.ai and more); others are derived from similar setups or projected from specs. Open source on GitHub.