▸ APPLE· M1 PRO

Apple M1 Pro (16GB)

Running LLMs on the Apple M1 Pro (16GB) — the long read: which models fit at which quantisation, and the settings worth changing. · Or what else $999 buys

USABLE MEMORY

10.7 GB

ENTRY-LEVEL

BANDWIDTH

200

GB/S

MODELS Q4

233/449

52%

7B Q4 SPEED

~25

GOOD

▸ MODEL COVERAGE @ Q452% OF ALL

▸ ESTIMATED SPEED· BY MODEL SIZE @ Q4

Average speeds at Q4 quantization. Actual performance varies by model architecture and context length.

~59

TOK/S

~25

TOK/S

14B

~13

TOK/S

32B

—

18.0GB NEEDED

70B

—

39.4GB NEEDED

▸ MEASURED RIG REPORTS

We rent the machine and time every model on it: decode, VRAM peak, concurrency, watts and cost per million tokens. Yours may already be one of them — and two are free to read in full.

SEE THE REPORTS →

▸ SPECIFICATIONS

USABLE MEMORY

10.7 GB of 16

BANDWIDTH

200 GB/s

FP16 COMPUTE

5.2 TFLOPS

TDP

30W

MEMORY

Unified

ARCHITECTURE

M1 Pro

MSRP

$999

112

FAST MODELS · >30 TOK/S

Real-time chat speed

233

USABLE · >10 TOK/S

Comfortable for all tasks

233

TOTAL COMPATIBLE

Fit in usable memory at Q4

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▸ COMPATIBLE MODELS· 233

Falcon-H1R Tiny 90M0.09B

FALCON·256K CTX· CHAT· REASONING

nomic-embed-text-v1.5 100M0.14B

EMBEDDING·8K CTX· CHAT

SMOLLM·8K CTX· CHAT· VISION

Snowflake Arctic Embed M v2.00.305B

EMBEDDING·8K CTX· EMBEDDING· MULTILINGUAL

bge-large-en-v1.5 335M0.335B

EMBEDDING·1K CTX· CHAT

mxbai-embed-large-v10.335B

EMBEDDING·1K CTX· EMBEDDING

Snowflake Arctic Embed L0.335B

EMBEDDING·1K CTX· EMBEDDING

LFM·125K CTX· CHAT· TOOL_USE

GPT-2 Medium 345M0.38B

SMOLLM·8K CTX· CHAT· VISION

FALCON·128K CTX· CHAT

EMBEDDING·8K CTX· EMBEDDING

Snowflake Arctic Embed L v2.00.568B

EMBEDDING·8K CTX· EMBEDDING· MULTILINGUAL

Qwen3-Embedding 0.6B0.6B

EMBEDDING·32K CTX· EMBEDDING· MULTILINGUAL

Falcon-H1R Tiny 0.6B0.6B

FALCON·32K CTX· CHAT· REASONING

Falcon Perception 0.6B0.6B

FALCON·4K CTX· VISION

LFM·125K CTX· CHAT· TOOL_USE

QWEN·32K CTX· CHAT· REASONING

GPT-2 Large 774M0.81B

QWEN·256K CTX· CHAT· CODING· MULTILINGUAL

OTHER·32K CTX· CHAT· VISION

MINICPM·128K CTX· CHAT· REASONING· MULTILINGUAL

LFM2.5-1.2B-Thinking1.2B

LFM·122K CTX· CHAT· REASONING· TOOL_USE

LFM·125K CTX· CHAT· TOOL_USE· MULTILINGUAL

OTHER·256K CTX· CHAT· VISION

DeepSeek Coder 1.3B1.35B

DEEPSEEK·16K CTX· CODING

PHI·2K CTX· CHAT· CODING

LFM·125K CTX· CHAT· TOOL_USE· MULTILINGUAL

▸ NEXT STEP

Get personalized recommendations.

See ranked models with benchmark scores, run commands, and precise speed estimates for your Apple M1 Pro (16GB).

▸Find models for Apple M1 Pro (16GB)Compare with other GPUs

WHAT THIS CARD IS WORTH

M1 Pro (16GB) holds 233 of the models in our catalogue and is, in practice, a IQ4_XS card — the largest it takes is Phi-3-medium-14b at IQ4_XS.

TOKENS/SEC PER $100

2.9

8B at Q4_K_M, so cards compare like for like

USABLE MEMORY PER $100

1.07 GB

what memory costs on this card

THE BIGGEST IT TAKES

Phi-3-medium-14b14B · IQ4_XS9.4 GB17 tok/sEST

Ministral 3 14B Reasoning13.95B · IQ4_XS9.3 GB17 tok/sEST

Mistral-Nemo 12.2B12.2B · Q4_K_M9.0 GB17 tok/sEST

Dolly v2 12B12B · Q4_K_M9.1 GB18 tok/sEST

StableLM 2 12B12B · Q4_K_M9.0 GB18 tok/sEST

Falcon2 11B11B · Q5_K_S9.5 GB17 tok/sEST

Llama-3.2-11B-Vision-Instruct11B · Q4_K_S9.4 GB20 tok/sEST

SOLAR-10.7B10.7B · Q5_K_M9.3 GB17 tok/sEST

AGAINST CARDS OF SIMILAR MEMORY

M3 Pro (18GB)12 GB$1,5991.5 tok/s per $100

M1 Pro (16GB)11 GB$9992.9 tok/s per $100

M2 Pro (16GB)11 GB$1,2992.2 tok/s per $100

M4 (16GB)11 GB$4994.0 tok/s per $100

M2 (16GB)11 GB$7992.1 tok/s per $100

Neighbours in memory rather than in price: memory decides whether a card can do the job at all, so two cards of the same size at different prices is the comparison you are making. Ordered by memory, then bandwidth — not by the value column, which is worked out from bandwidth and price alone and therefore rewards a cheap card whatever its software stack does to that bandwidth in practice. Read it as one input, not as a ranking.

▸ DEVICE UNDER TEST

Apple M1 Pro (16GB) — 16 GB unified, 10.7 GB usable.

▸ APPLE M1 PRO (16GB) SPEC

BRAND: Apple
UNIFIED MEMORY: 16 GB
USABLE BY A MODEL: 10.7 GB
BANDWIDTH: 200 GB/s
FP16 COMPUTE: 5.2 TFLOPS
FP32 COMPUTE: 5.2 TFLOPS
TDP: 30 W
ARCHITECTURE: M1 Pro
MSRP: $999

▸ AI CAPABILITY

233/ 449 models @ Q4

With 10.7 GB of its 16 GB reaching a model and 200 GB/s bandwidth, this machine handles models up to 13B parameters.

Speed ≈ bandwidth / model_size × efficiency. A 7B model at Q4 runs at ~23 tok/s.

RENT IT — LIVE PRICES

Checking what the clouds are charging…

§ 01TOP MODELS FOR APPLE M1 PRO (16GB)

233 FIT · SHOWING 20

MODEL	SIZE	VRAM Q4	TOK/S	AVG
Baichuan2 13B	13B	8.4 GB	14	23.6
Llama 2 13B	13B	8.4 GB	14	17.2
CodeLlama 13B	13B	8.4 GB	14	19.7
Vicuna 13B	13B	8.4 GB	14	11.8
LLaMA 1 13B	13B	8.4 GB	14	32.9
OPT 13B	13B	8.4 GB	14	35.8
Orca 2 13B	13B	8.4 GB	14	25.4
WizardCoder Python 13B	13B	8.4 GB	14	60.1
WizardLM 13B	13B	8.4 GB	14	19.5
Mistral-Nemo 12.2B	12.2B	7.9 GB	15	22.4
Dolly v2 12B	12B	7.8 GB	15	6.4
StableLM 2 12B	12B	7.8 GB	15	21.3
Falcon2 11B	11B	7.2 GB	16	33.2
SOLAR-10.7B	10.7B	7.0 GB	17	28.2
Falcon3-10B	10.3B	6.8 GB	17	38.2
GLM-4.1V 9B Thinking	10.29B	6.8 GB	17	—
Bamba 9B v2	9.78B	6.5 GB	18	26.1
Qwen 3.5 9B	9.65B	6.4 GB	18	50.6
RecurrentGemma 9B	9.63B	6.4 GB	18	35.0
glm-4-9b	9.4B	6.2 GB	19	20.5