On my MacBook Air m2, I’m currently using Qwen 3.5 4b with 8 bit quantisation, and even at its maximum context length, multiple web search RAGs, and the model being built for vision and reasoning, it only ever hits 4.3gb of memory tops.
I run it though LM Studio, so paired with the fact it’s a Mac, your mileage may vary in terms of how much memory it uses, but it does have [from my experience] an output quality a bit over ChatGPT 4o, and is actually really solid for research purposes if that’s what you’re looking for.
On my MacBook Air m2, I’m currently using Qwen 3.5 4b with 8 bit quantisation, and even at its maximum context length, multiple web search RAGs, and the model being built for vision and reasoning, it only ever hits 4.3gb of memory tops.
I run it though LM Studio, so paired with the fact it’s a Mac, your mileage may vary in terms of how much memory it uses, but it does have [from my experience] an output quality a bit over ChatGPT 4o, and is actually really solid for research purposes if that’s what you’re looking for.