Can MacBook Pro M3 Max 128 GB run Kolibri-1 (78B-A3.5B)?
128 GB unified · 400 GB/s memory bandwidth · Kolibri-1 (78B-A3.5B) has 78.1B parameters (3.46B active per token).
Short answer
Yes, excellent for chat and acceptable or better for every workload we test.
Best quantization for chat: FP8 (73 GB of weights) on LM Studio. Generation: 50–70 tok/s, leaving about 44 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 | FP8 | 50–70 tok/s | under 1 s | 8K | Details |
| Coding questionswith Continue | Excellent | FP8 | 50–70 tok/s | ≈4 s | 16K | Details |
| Coding in a repositorywith Aider | Acceptable | FP8 | 50–65 tok/s | ≈10 s | 32K | Details |
| Agentic codingwith OpenCode | Acceptable | FP8 | 45–65 tok/s | ≈15 s | 32K | Details |
| Long documents (64K)with Open WebUI | Excellent | FP8 | 40–55 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
Other models for MacBook Pro M3 Max 128 GB
The best-rated models for chat on this machine.
- gpt-oss-120b65–85 tok/sExcellent
- Qwen3.6 35B-A3B75–100 tok/sExcellent
- Qwen3-Next 80B-A3B Instruct70–100 tok/sExcellent
- Gemma 4 26B-A4B55–80 tok/sExcellent
- Qwen3.5 35B-A3B75–100 tok/sExcellent
- LFM2.5 24B-A2B140–190 tok/sExcellent
Cheapest machines for Kolibri-1 (78B-A3.5B)
Hardware rated comfortable or better for chat, lowest price first.
- Desktop PC · Ryzen 9 9950X (no GPU) · 64 GB DDR5$1,400 · 13–20 tok/sComfortable
- Ryzen AI Max+ 395 mini PC / Framework Desktop · 64 GB$1,600 · 65–90 tok/sExcellent
- Ryzen AI Max+ 395 mini PC / Framework Desktop · 128 GB$2,000 · 40–55 tok/sExcellent
- Mac mini M4 Pro 64 GB$2,199 · 60–80 tok/sExcellent
- Mac Studio M1 Max 64 GB$2,399 · 80–110 tok/sExcellent
- Mac mini M5 Pro 64 GB$2,499 · 55–90 tok/sExcellent
Different tool, context size or workload?
These pages use typical settings. The full check models your exact setup.