Best model for 16gb ram Mac

Hi everybody! Every now and then these days, we’re seeing really huge open-weight models popping up. But since not everybody has a DGX Station at home, I’m interested in really small models. It’s incredible to see how much knowledge and intelligence labs can pack into <10 GB models. On my Mac mini, for now I mainly use Gemma 4 12B QAT around 8–9 GB of weights. Do you think there’s any better model that could replace it? I primarily use it to anonymize text before sending it to frontier cloud models, and for really light coding in Pi Agent with llama.cpp. OFC, it doesn’t perform really well, but at least I know that if a nuke strikes and there’s no internet, I’ll have the best model possible for my hardware, able to chat about offline Wikipedia knowledge, survival guides and create a Python Snake game from scratch to play in the terminal. submitted by /u/cri10095 [link] [comments]

Source: r/LocalLLaMA | 2026-08-24