Can MacBook Air M5 24 GB run Gemma 4 26B-A4B?
24 GB unified · 153 GB/s memory bandwidth · Gemma 4 26B-A4B has 25.8B parameters (3.8B active per token).
Short answer
Yes, comfortable for chat and acceptable or better for every workload we test.
Best quantization for chat: 4-bit (14 GB of weights) on LM Studio. Generation: 25–45 tok/s, leaving about 1.6 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 | Comfortable | 4-bit | 25–45 tok/s | under 1 s | 8K | Details |
| Coding questionswith Continue | Comfortable | 3-bit | 30–55 tok/s | ≈4 s | 16K | Details |
| Coding in a repositorywith Aider | Acceptable | 3-bit | 30–45 tok/s | ≈15 s | 32K | Details |
| Agentic codingwith OpenCode | Acceptable | 3-bit | 25–45 tok/s | ≈20 s | 32K | Details |
| Long documents (64K)with Open WebUI | Comfortable | 3-bit | 20–35 tok/s | ≈50 s | 64K | Details |
Speeds are bandwidth-based estimates; no direct benchmark exists for this pair. “First reply” is the time to read the workload’s opening prompt. How we calculate
Get it running
Copy-paste commands for the 3-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-Q3_K_XL
Downloads 12.91 GB (UD-Q3_K_XL). Ollama's default context is small: set OLLAMA_CONTEXT_LENGTH=65536 before `ollama serve` for long prompts.
Other models for MacBook Air M5 24 GB
The best-rated models for chat on this machine.
- gpt-oss-20b25–45 tok/sExcellent
- MiniCPM5 2B25–45 tok/sExcellent
- Qwen3.5 4B19–30 tok/sExcellent
- Llama 3.2 3B Instruct25–45 tok/sExcellent
- Gemma 4 E4B16–25 tok/sExcellent
- Llama 3.1 8B Instruct15–25 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.