How fast will Qwen3 30B A3B feel on the MacBook M3 Max 48GB?

Qwen3 30B A3B on the MacBook M3 Max 48GB

Qwen3 30B A3B is a 30.53B-parameter mixture-of-experts model (3.3B active per token). At Q4_K_M it needs about 19.3 GB of memory. The MacBook M3 Max 48GB has 36 GB usable, so it fits entirely in memory. Expect about 94 tokens/sec (80–108), with the first token after 0.3 s for a short prompt. This estimate is projected from the hardware specs; no benchmarks exist yet.

Speed by quantization

QuantizationFile sizeMemoryGenerationFirst tokenSource
Q4_K_M18.6 GBFits94 tok/s0.3 sProjected
Q8_032.5 GBFits54 tok/s0.3 sProjected
FP1661.1 GBDoesn't fitWon't run——

Qwen3 30B A3B on other hardware

Other models on the MacBook M3 Max 48GB

All models on the MacBook M3 Max 48GB · Qwen3 30B A3B on all 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.