Can MacBook Pro M3 Pro 18 GB run Phi-4 (14B)?
18 GB unified · 150 GB/s memory bandwidth · Phi-4 (14B) has 14.7B parameters.
Short answer
Yes, comfortable for chat; doesn't fit for coding questions.
Best quantization for chat: 3-bit (6.0 GB of weights) on LM Studio. Generation: 14–18 tok/s, leaving about 1.8 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 | 3-bit | 14–18 tok/s | ≈6 s | 8K | Details |
| Coding questionswith Continue | Does Not Fit | — | — | — | — | Details |
| Coding in a repositorywith Aider | Does Not Fit | — | — | — | — | Details |
| Agentic codingwith OpenCode | Does Not Fit | — | — | — | — | Details |
| Long documents (64K)with Open WebUI | Borderline | 3-bit | 10–14 tok/s | ≈2 min | 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 3-bit build with a 8K context. Ollama and llama.cpp download the file straight from Hugging Face.
ollama run hf.co/unsloth/phi-4-GGUF:Q3_K_M
Downloads 7.19 GB (Q3_K_M). Ollama's default context is small: set OLLAMA_CONTEXT_LENGTH=8192 before `ollama serve` for long prompts.
Other models for MacBook Pro M3 Pro 18 GB
The best-rated models for chat on this machine.
- MiniCPM5 2B35–45 tok/sExcellent
- Qwen3.5 4B25–30 tok/sExcellent
- Llama 3.2 3B Instruct30–45 tok/sExcellent
- Qwen3 8B19–25 tok/sExcellent
- Gemma 4 E4B20–30 tok/sExcellent
- DeepSeek-R1-0528-Qwen3-8B19–25 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
Same chip, other memory: 36 GB
Different tool, context size or workload?
These pages use typical settings. The full check models your exact setup.