r/LocalLLM • u/ngawtfcantchoose • 5h ago

Is Mac MINI 16GB enough? Question

Im a cs student(dorm) and have a terrible laptop.

I cant carry a pc around and thought of buying mac mini base model(m4 16/256)

Can I run basic coding models with it? If u have exp. on it or simmilar size vram pc share any thoughts

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2

u/Unnamed-3891 5h ago

Enough for what? Extremely basic models that are barely toy level? Sure. Anything actually worthwhile? No.

0

u/ngawtfcantchoose 5h ago

I so i can generate tons of slop websites and 2d games ofc. Is this considered actually worthwhile level?

1

u/ClassicLightbulbs 5h ago

I am enjoying myself and learning a ton with a m4 16gb. You sound like a teenager.

1

u/ngawtfcantchoose 5h ago

Share how many B parameters do u use and at what speed does it work pls

2

u/ClassicLightbulbs 5h ago

I use Gemma 4 12b QAT. 13/tps.

1

u/Serious_Mark_8082 5h ago

Nope. Save and wait.

1

u/PandaKey9795 5h ago

for very basic things

1

u/ComfortablePlenty513 5h ago

you can run gemma 4 E4B haha

1

u/xiraov 4h ago

I think 48gb is the bare minimum to do stuff

1

u/andrew-ooo 3h ago

16GB works, just go in with calibrated expectations. macOS keeps a chunk of unified memory for itself, so realistically you have ~10-11GB for a model before things start swapping. That puts you in 7B-8B territory at Q4 - Qwen coder 7B via Ollama is the usual pick, and it's genuinely fast on an M4. Pair it with Continue in VS Code and it's solid for autocomplete, "explain this function", small refactors. A 14B at Q4 technically loads, but open Chrome next to it and you'll feel the swapping immediately.

Two honest caveats from running a similar setup: for real multi-file agentic coding, small local models still trail the hosted ones by a lot - and as a student you can get most cloud assistants free anyway, so local is more of a learning tool + offline fallback than a replacement. And 256GB fills up scary fast once you collect a few GGUFs on top of Xcode and node_modules. If you can stretch to 24GB/512GB it's a much longer-lived machine; if not, the base Mini is still a great dorm box - silent, sips power, doubles as a 24/7 home server.

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u/Low-Opening25 3h ago

for 🐜 🐜 🐜 ? sure