Can MacBook Pro M5 Max 36 GB run Muse Glimmer (30B)?
36 GB unified · 460 GB/s memory bandwidth · Muse Glimmer (30B) has 29.6B parameters.
Short answer
Yes, comfortable for chat and acceptable or better for every workload we test.
Best quantization for chat: Q4_K_M (16 GB of weights) on LM Studio. Generation: 14–25 tok/s, leaving about 11 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 | Q4_K_M | 14–25 tok/s | ≈2 s | 8K | Details |
| Coding questionswith Continue | Comfortable | Q4_K_M | 13–20 tok/s | ≈8 s | 16K | Details |
| Coding in a repositorywith Aider | Acceptable | Q4_K_M | 13–20 tok/s | ≈25 s | 32K | Details |
| Agentic codingwith OpenCode | Acceptable | Q4_K_M | 13–20 tok/s | ≈35 s | 32K | Details |
| Long documents (64K)with Open WebUI | Comfortable | Q4_K_M | 13–20 tok/s | ≈2 min | 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
Other models for MacBook Pro M5 Max 36 GB
The best-rated models for chat on this machine.
- Qwen3.6 35B-A3B95–160 tok/sExcellent
- Gemma 4 26B-A4B65–110 tok/sExcellent
- LFM2.5 24B-A2B130–220 tok/sExcellent
- Qwen3.5 35B-A3B95–160 tok/sExcellent
- gpt-oss-20b80–130 tok/sExcellent
- GLM-4.7-Flash (30B-A3B)95–150 tok/sExcellent
Cheapest machines for Muse Glimmer (30B)
Hardware rated comfortable or better for chat, lowest price first.
- Desktop PC · Intel Arc Pro B60 24GB · 32 GB RAM$1,500 · 10–17 tok/sComfortable
- Desktop PC · Radeon RX 7900 XT · 32 GB RAM$1,550 · 25–40 tok/sExcellent
- Ryzen AI Max+ 395 mini PC / Framework Desktop · 64 GB$1,600 · 12–16 tok/sComfortable
- Desktop PC · Intel Arc Pro B60 24GB · 64 GB RAM$1,628 · 10–17 tok/sComfortable
- Desktop PC · GeForce RTX 3090 · 32 GB RAM$1,700 · 30–40 tok/sExcellent
- Mac mini M4 Pro 48 GB$1,799 · 10–14 tok/sComfortable
Different tool, context size or workload?
These pages use typical settings. The full check models your exact setup.