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Best Local LLMs for MacBook Air (2026) — M1 to M5, 8–24 GB
The best model to run on a fanless MacBook Air, by chip and RAM. Realistic tok/s, the thermal reality of long sessions, and the top pick for every Air.
How to Run Local LLMs on an Intel Mac (2026) — What's Possible
No Apple Silicon? You can still run local AI on an Intel Mac — here's what's realistic, the best small models, honest tok/s expectations, and when to upgrade.
How to Run Qwen 3.6 on a Mac (35B-A3B and 27B) — Setup Guide
Run Qwen3.6-27B — the #1 Mac-runnable local LLM — or the faster Qwen3.6-35B-A3B on Apple Silicon. Step-by-step Ollama, LM Studio, and MLX setup, RAM requirements, and estimated speeds. Free, private, Apache 2.0.
Build a Local AI Coding Assistant on Mac — Qwen3.6 + Continue.dev
A private, offline coding assistant with Qwen 3.6-27B (77.2% SWE-bench Verified) or KAT-Coder-V2.5 wired into VS Code, Zed, or Cursor — autocomplete, chat, and agent mode, fully local.
How to Use MCP (Model Context Protocol) with Local LLMs on Mac
Give your private, local model agentic tool access with MCP — run Qwen 3.6 in Ollama, add MCP servers (filesystem, web), and connect them. Fully offline.
How to Fine-Tune a Local LLM on Mac with MLX (LoRA)
Fine-tune an open model on your own data, entirely on Apple Silicon, with MLX-LM and LoRA. Prepare a dataset, train, fuse, and run your custom model in Ollama.
How to Install Ollama on Mac — Complete Setup Guide (2026)
Download, install, and run your first local AI model with Ollama in under 5 minutes on any Apple Silicon Mac.
How to Run Llama 4 Locally on Mac — Scout & Maverick Guide
Hardware requirements, installation steps, and performance tips for running Meta's Llama 4 Scout on your Mac.
Getting Started with MLX: Apple's AI Framework for Mac
Install MLX, download models from HuggingFace, and run inference 20-50% faster than llama.cpp on Apple Silicon.
LLM Quantization Explained: Q4, Q5, Q8 — Which Is Best for Mac?
Understand quantization levels, compare size vs quality tradeoffs, and pick the right quant for your Mac's RAM.
LM Studio Setup Guide for Mac — Download, Install & First Chat
Get LM Studio running on your Mac with a beautiful GUI. Download models, start chatting, and enable the local API.