5 Open-Source AI Models Actually Worth Running on Your M5 Mac in 2026
The five open-source AI models worth running on an M5 Mac in April 2026 are Mistral 7B (16 GB), Qwen 3.5 9B (24 GB), DeepSeek R1 Distill Qwen 14B (24 GB), Gemma 4 26B-A4B (32 GB), and Qwen 3.5 35B-A3B (32 GB+). Minimum unified memory is 16 GB, the sweet spot is 24 GB, and anything above 30B parameters needs 32 GB or more. Frontier open-source models like GLM-5 or the full DeepSeek R1 need hundreds of GBs of VRAM, so skip those entirely. The five below are what actually fits. Apple’s own MLX benchmarks show the M5 chip delivering a 3 to 4 times speedup on time-to-first-token compared to […]
