Can MacBook Pro M5 Max 48 GB run Qwen3-Next 80B-A3B Instruct?
48 GB unified · 614 GB/s memory bandwidth · Qwen3-Next 80B-A3B Instruct has 81.3B parameters (3B active per token).
Short answer
Yes, comfortable for chat; borderline for coding in a repository.
Best quantization for chat: 3-bit (33 GB of weights) on LM Studio. Generation: 160–270 tok/s, leaving about 4.7 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 | 160–270 tok/s | under 1 s | 8K | Details |
| Coding questionswith Continue | Acceptable | 3-bit | 160–260 tok/s | ≈1 s | 16K | Details |
| Coding in a repositorywith Aider | Borderline | 3-bit | 130–220 tok/s | ≈3 s | 32K | Details |
| Agentic codingwith OpenCode | Borderline | 3-bit | 120–210 tok/s | ≈4 s | 32K | Details |
| Long documents (64K)with Open WebUI | Borderline | 3-bit | 85–150 tok/s | ≈10 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 3-bit build with a 16K context. Ollama and llama.cpp download the file straight from Hugging Face.
ollama run hf.co/unsloth/Qwen3-Next-80B-A3B-Instruct-GGUF:Q3_K_M
Downloads 38.3 GB (Q3_K_M). Ollama's default context is small: set OLLAMA_CONTEXT_LENGTH=16384 before `ollama serve` for long prompts.
Other models for MacBook Pro M5 Max 48 GB
The best-rated models for chat on this machine.
- Qwen3.6 35B-A3B110–180 tok/sExcellent
- Gemma 4 26B-A4B70–120 tok/sExcellent
- Qwen3.5 35B-A3B110–180 tok/sExcellent
- LFM2.5 24B-A2B180–300 tok/sExcellent
- gpt-oss-20b110–180 tok/sExcellent
- GLM-4.7-Flash (30B-A3B)90–150 tok/sExcellent
Cheapest machines for Qwen3-Next 80B-A3B Instruct
Hardware rated comfortable or better for chat, lowest price first.
- Desktop PC · Ryzen 9 9950X (no GPU) · 64 GB DDR5$1,400 · 15–25 tok/sComfortable
- Ryzen AI Max+ 395 mini PC / Framework Desktop · 64 GB$1,600 · 80–110 tok/sComfortable
- Ryzen AI Max+ 395 mini PC / Framework Desktop · 128 GB$2,000 · 55–75 tok/sExcellent
- Mac mini M4 Pro 64 GB$2,199 · 70–100 tok/sExcellent
- Mac Studio M1 Max 64 GB$2,399 · 100–140 tok/sExcellent
- Mac mini M5 Pro 64 GB$2,499 · 65–110 tok/sExcellent
Different tool, context size or workload?
These pages use typical settings. The full check models your exact setup.