Can MacBook Air M5 24 GB run gpt-oss-20b?
24 GB unified · 153 GB/s memory bandwidth · gpt-oss-20b has 20.9B parameters (3.6B active per token).
Short answer
Yes, excellent for chat; borderline for coding in a repository.
Best quantization for chat: MXFP4 (11 GB of weights) on LM Studio. Generation: 25–45 tok/s, leaving about 4.2 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 | MXFP4 | 25–45 tok/s | under 1 s | 8K | Details |
| Coding questionswith Continue | Acceptable | MXFP4 | 25–45 tok/s | ≈4 s | 16K | Details |
| Coding in a repositorywith Aider | Borderline | MXFP4 | 25–40 tok/s | ≈10 s | 32K | Details |
| Agentic codingwith OpenCode | Borderline | MXFP4 | 20–35 tok/s | ≈15 s | 32K | Details |
| Long documents (64K)with Open WebUI | Acceptable | MXFP4 | 17–30 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 MXFP4 build with a 64K context. Ollama and llama.cpp download the file straight from Hugging Face.
ollama run hf.co/unsloth/gpt-oss-20b-GGUF:F16
Downloads 13.79 GB (F16). 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.
- 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
- Qwen2.5-Coder 7B Instruct17–30 tok/sExcellent
Cheapest machines for gpt-oss-20b
Hardware rated comfortable or better for chat, lowest price first.
- Mac mini M4 24 GB$999 · 25–35 tok/sExcellent
- Mac mini M6 24 GB$1,299 · 30–50 tok/sExcellent
- Laptop · Ryzen AI 9 HX 370 (Radeon 890M) · 32 GB$1,300 · 20–35 tok/sExcellent
- Laptop · Core Ultra 7 258V (Arc 140V) · 32 GB$1,300 · 18–30 tok/sExcellent
- Desktop PC · GeForce RTX 5060 Ti 16GB · 32 GB RAM$1,330 · ≈100 tok/sExcellent
- Desktop PC · GeForce RTX 4060 Ti 16GB · 32 GB RAM$1,350 · 50–85 tok/sExcellent
Different tool, context size or workload?
These pages use typical settings. The full check models your exact setup.