Can Mac mini M4 24 GB run Gemma 4 E4B?
24 GB unified · 120 GB/s memory bandwidth · Gemma 4 E4B has 8B parameters.
Short answer
Yes, comfortable for chat; borderline for coding in a repository.
Best quantization for chat: 6-bit (6.2 GB of weights) on LM Studio. Generation: 11–15 tok/s, leaving about 9.1 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 | 6-bit | 11–15 tok/s | ≈2 s | 8K | Details |
| Coding questionswith Continue | Acceptable | 6-bit | 11–15 tok/s | ≈15 s | 16K | Details |
| Coding in a repositorywith Aider | Borderline | 6-bit | 10–14 tok/s | ≈45 s | 32K | Details |
| Agentic codingwith OpenCode | Borderline | 6-bit | 10–14 tok/s | ≈60 s | 32K | Details |
| Long documents (64K)with Open WebUI | Acceptable | 6-bit | 9–12 tok/s | ≈3 min | 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-E4B-it-GGUF:Q6_K
Downloads 7.07 GB (Q6_K). Ollama's default context is small: set OLLAMA_CONTEXT_LENGTH=65536 before `ollama serve` for long prompts.
Other models for Mac mini M4 24 GB
The best-rated models for chat on this machine.
- gpt-oss-20b25–35 tok/sExcellent
- MiniCPM5 2B25–35 tok/sExcellent
- Qwen3.5 4B19–25 tok/sExcellent
- Llama 3.2 3B Instruct25–35 tok/sExcellent
- LFM2.5 24B-A2B45–60 tok/sComfortable
- Gemma 4 26B-A4B25–35 tok/sComfortable
Cheapest machines for Gemma 4 E4B
Hardware rated comfortable or better for chat, lowest price first.
- Mac mini M4 16 GB$599 · 13–18 tok/sComfortable
- Mac mini M6 16 GB$899 · 18–30 tok/sExcellent
- MacBook Air M4 16 GB$999 · 13–18 tok/sComfortable
- Mac mini M2 16 GB$999 · 11–15 tok/sComfortable
- MacBook Air M5 16 GB$1,099 · 16–25 tok/sExcellent
- Desktop PC · Intel Arc B580 · 32 GB RAM$1,150 · 35–45 tok/sExcellent
Different tool, context size or workload?
These pages use typical settings. The full check models your exact setup.