Can Mac Studio M4 Max 64 GB run Phi-4 (14B)?
64 GB unified · 546 GB/s memory bandwidth · Phi-4 (14B) has 14.7B parameters.
Short answer
Yes, excellent for chat; borderline for 64K-token documents.
Best quantization for chat: 5-bit (9.5 GB of weights) on LM Studio. Generation: 30–40 tok/s, leaving about 42 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 | 5-bit | 30–40 tok/s | ≈2 s | 8K | Details |
| Coding questionswith Continue | Comfortable | 6-bit | 25–35 tok/s | ≈10 s | 16K | Details |
| Coding in a repositorywith Aider | Acceptable | 6-bit | 20–30 tok/s | ≈40 s | 16K | Details |
| Agentic codingwith OpenCode | Acceptable | 6-bit | 20–30 tok/s | ≈45 s | 16K | Details |
| Long documents (64K)with Open WebUI | Borderline | 6-bit | 20–30 tok/s | ≈45 s | 16K | 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 16K context. Ollama and llama.cpp download the file straight from Hugging Face.
ollama run hf.co/unsloth/phi-4-GGUF:Q6_K
Downloads 12.03 GB (Q6_K). Ollama's default context is small: set OLLAMA_CONTEXT_LENGTH=16384 before `ollama serve` for long prompts.
Other models for Mac Studio M4 Max 64 GB
The best-rated models for chat on this machine.
- Qwen3.6 35B-A3B95–130 tok/sExcellent
- Qwen3-Next 80B-A3B Instruct140–180 tok/sExcellent
- Gemma 4 26B-A4B75–100 tok/sExcellent
- Qwen3.5 35B-A3B95–130 tok/sExcellent
- LFM2.5 24B-A2B190–250 tok/sExcellent
- gpt-oss-20b110–150 tok/sExcellent
Cheapest machines for Phi-4 (14B)
Hardware rated comfortable or better for chat, lowest price first.
- Mac mini M6 24 GB$1,299 · 10–16 tok/sComfortable
- Desktop PC · GeForce RTX 5060 Ti 16GB · 32 GB RAM$1,330 · 25–35 tok/sExcellent
- Desktop PC · GeForce RTX 4060 Ti 16GB · 32 GB RAM$1,350 · 15–25 tok/sExcellent
- Mac mini M4 Pro 24 GB$1,399 · 19–25 tok/sExcellent
- Desktop PC · Radeon RX 9070 XT · 32 GB RAM$1,500 · 40–55 tok/sExcellent
- Desktop PC · Intel Arc Pro B60 24GB · 32 GB RAM$1,500 · 16–25 tok/sExcellent
Different tool, context size or workload?
These pages use typical settings. The full check models your exact setup.