Can MacBook Air M3 24 GB run Qwen3.5 35B-A3B?
24 GB unified · 100 GB/s memory bandwidth · Qwen3.5 35B-A3B has 36B parameters (3B active per token).
Short answer
It loads, but it's borderline even for chat.
Best quantization for chat: 3-bit (15 GB of weights) on LM Studio. Generation: 35–50 tok/s, leaving about 0.7 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 | Borderline | 3-bit | 35–50 tok/s | ≈2 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 | 20–30 tok/s | ≈3 min | 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
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/Qwen3.5-35B-A3B-GGUF:Q3_K_M
Downloads 16.36 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 Air M3 24 GB
The best-rated models for chat on this machine.
- gpt-oss-20b25–30 tok/sExcellent
- MiniCPM5 2B25–30 tok/sExcellent
- Qwen3.5 4B19–25 tok/sExcellent
- Llama 3.2 3B Instruct20–30 tok/sExcellent
- LFM2.5 24B-A2B40–50 tok/sComfortable
- Gemma 4 26B-A4B20–30 tok/sComfortable
Cheapest machines for Qwen3.5 35B-A3B
Hardware rated comfortable or better for chat, lowest price first.
- Mac mini M4 32 GB$1,399 · 30–45 tok/sExcellent
- Desktop PC · Ryzen 9 9950X (no GPU) · 64 GB DDR5$1,400 · 11–18 tok/sComfortable
- Desktop PC · Intel Arc Pro B60 24GB · 32 GB RAM$1,500 · 70–120 tok/sExcellent
- Ryzen AI Max+ 395 mini PC / Framework Desktop · 64 GB$1,600 · 55–75 tok/sExcellent
- Desktop PC · Intel Arc Pro B60 24GB · 64 GB RAM$1,628 · 70–120 tok/sExcellent
- Mac mini M2 Pro 32 GB$1,699 · 55–75 tok/sExcellent
Different tool, context size or workload?
These pages use typical settings. The full check models your exact setup.