Can Mac Studio M4 Max 48 GB run Gemma 4 26B-A4B?
48 GB unified · 546 GB/s memory bandwidth · Gemma 4 26B-A4B has 25.8B parameters (3.8B active per token).
Short answer
Yes, excellent for chat and comfortable or better for every workload we test.
Best quantization for chat: 6-bit (20 GB of weights) on LM Studio. Generation: 75–100 tok/s, leaving about 18 GB free for your other apps.
How it rates for each workload
Same model and machine, different jobs. Agents and long documents send far bigger prompts than chat, so they need much more speed and memory.
| Workload | Verdict | Quant | Generation | First reply | Context | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Chatwith Open WebUI | Excellent | 6-bit | 75–100 tok/s | under 1 s | 8K | Details |
| Coding questionswith Continue | Excellent | 6-bit | 75–100 tok/s | ≈3 s | 16K | Details |
| Coding in a repositorywith Aider | Comfortable | 6-bit | 70–95 tok/s | ≈10 s | 32K | Details |
| Agentic codingwith OpenCode | Comfortable | 6-bit | 65–90 tok/s | ≈15 s | 32K | Details |
| Long documents (64K)with Open WebUI | Excellent | 6-bit | 55–75 tok/s | ≈40 s | 64K | Details |
Speeds are estimates calibrated against measured benchmarks on similar hardware. “First reply” is the time to read the workload’s opening prompt. How we calculate
Get it running
Copy-paste commands for the 6-bit build with a 64K context. Ollama and llama.cpp download the file straight from Hugging Face.
ollama run hf.co/unsloth/gemma-4-26B-A4B-it-GGUF:UD-Q6_K_XL
Downloads 23.3 GB (UD-Q6_K_XL). Ollama's default context is small: set OLLAMA_CONTEXT_LENGTH=65536 before `ollama serve` for long prompts.
Other models for Mac Studio M4 Max 48 GB
The best-rated models for chat on this machine.
- Qwen3.6 35B-A3B110–150 tok/sExcellent
- Qwen3.5 35B-A3B110–150 tok/sExcellent
- LFM2.5 24B-A2B190–250 tok/sExcellent
- gpt-oss-20b110–150 tok/sExcellent
- GLM-4.7-Flash (30B-A3B)90–120 tok/sExcellent
- Qwen3 30B-A3B Instruct 250780–110 tok/sExcellent
Cheapest machines for Gemma 4 26B-A4B
Hardware rated comfortable or better for chat, lowest price first.
- Mac mini M4 24 GB$999 · 25–35 tok/sComfortable
- Mac mini M6 24 GB$1,299 · 30–50 tok/sComfortable
- Laptop · Core Ultra 7 258V (Arc 140V) · 32 GB$1,300 · 15–25 tok/sExcellent
- Laptop · Ryzen AI 9 HX 370 (Radeon 890M) · 32 GB$1,300 · 16–25 tok/sComfortable
- Mac mini M4 32 GB$1,399 · 25–35 tok/sExcellent
- MacBook Air M4 24 GB$1,399 · 25–35 tok/sComfortable
Different tool, context size or workload?
These pages use typical settings. The full check models your exact setup.