Best local AI for Apple M1 · 8GB

The best local AI on a Apple M1 · 8GB right now is DeepSeek-R1 (distill) (1.5B @ Q4_K_M, ~30–50 tok/s). Full ranking below — capability × real speed on this hardware, never sponsored.

#modelbest fitverdictspeed
1 DeepSeek-R1 (distill) 1.5B Q4_K_M ✅ Runs comfortably 30–50 tok/s
2 Qwen2.5 3B Q5_K_M ✅ Runs (tight) 16–25 tok/s
3 Qwen3 1.7B Q4_K_M ✅ Runs (tight) 20–35 tok/s
4 Llama 3.2 1B Q4_K_M ✅ Runs comfortably 40–65 tok/s
5 Gemma 2 2B Q4_K_M ✅ Runs (tight) 16–25 tok/s
6 Gemma 3 1B Q4_K_M ✅ Runs comfortably 50–85 tok/s
7 TinyLlama 1.1B Q4_K_M ✅ Runs comfortably 50–85 tok/s
8 Qwen2.5-Coder 1.5B Q8_0 ✅ Runs comfortably 25–40 tok/s
9 SmolLM3 3B 3B Q4_K_M ✅ Runs (tight) 16–25 tok/s
10 Nomic Embed Text 137M F16 ✅ Runs comfortably 75–120 tok/s
11 StarCoder2 3B Q4_K_M ✅ Runs (tight) 19–30 tok/s
12 mxbai-embed-large 335M F16 ✅ Runs comfortably 30–50 tok/s
$npx runlocal-sh install deepseek-r1

Rankings use the same GQA-aware fit + bandwidth-calibrated speed math as the CLI — no sponsorships, no affiliate re-sorting, ever.

Different machine? Apple M1 Pro · 16GB · Apple M2 · 16GB · Apple M3 Pro · 18GB · Apple M2 Pro · 32GB · Apple M4 Pro · 48GB · Apple M3 Max · 36GB

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