Best local LLM for mac mini m2
Top 7 open-source picks for mac mini m2, ranked by benchmark performance and real-world fit. Updated monthly.
Granite 4.0 H-Tiny 7B-A1B
IBM's edge-class hybrid MoE with 7B total and only 1B active parameters — Apache 2.0 licensed and built for embedded and low-cost serving.
Lucie 7B
A French-sovereign 7B model from OpenLLM-France, backed by CNRS and LINAGORA, with a fully transparent and auditable training corpus.
DeepSeek R1 Distill 7B
A 7B DeepSeek model distilled from R1 671B with explicit chain-of-thought reasoning. Surprisingly strong on AIME and MATH for its size.
Qwen 3 8B
Alibaba's 8B dense model with a toggleable thinking mode and broad multilingual coverage. Punches well above its weight for an 8B and runs comfortably on a single consumer GPU.
Qwen 2.5 VL 7B
A 7B vision-language model from Alibaba with state-of-the-art results in its class, scoring 95.7 on DocVQA. Handles hour-long video, bounding-box grounding, and multilingual OCR.
Qwen 2.5 Omni 7B
Alibaba's first true omni-modal open model — text, image, audio, and video in, with text and speech out. A research-grade preview rather than a production-ready release.
Qwen 3.5 9B
Alibaba's next-generation dense 9B model with a 262K native context window and an improved toggleable thinking mode. Apache 2.0 licensed.