Pre-release
Qwen3.5 9B becomes the recommended model for 16 GB Macs
- Bake-off on a 16 GB M1 Pro across the three 16 GB-class models: Qwen3.5 9B answered fastest (19 tokens per second), scored best on the test prompts and is the smallest download of the three, so it is now the first pick for 16 GB Macs. Gemma 4 12B stays in the lineup as the alternative.
- Gemma 4 works: the app now understands its chat format, which the bundled llama.cpp build did not.
- Gemma 4 no longer runs out of GPU memory at a 16k context on 16 GB Macs (sliding-window layers use a window-sized cache: 0.7 GB instead of 5.4 GB).
- Follow-up turns in a thread reuse the cached prompt on every model, so the second message in a long chat starts streaming in well under a second instead of re-reading the whole conversation.