Will it run? / Qwen 3 8B / Mac mini M2 (16GB)

Can the Mac mini M2 (16GB) run Qwen 3 8B?

Comfortable Yes, at about 16 tokens/sec (measured). That reads at a comfortable pace.

16measured tokens/sec
6.7 GBmemory needed
10.7 GBavailable to the model
100 GB/smemory bandwidth
ollama run qwen3:8b

Check the Mac mini M2 (16GB) price →

How we got this number

Measured on a real Mac mini M2 (16GB) with Ollama (VsMacs run, Ollama 0.34.4, Sep 2026).

Faster machines for Qwen 3 8B

Mac Studio M5 Ultra (96GB)120+ tok/s$5,499Check price →
Mac Studio M5 Ultra (256GB)120+ tok/s$9,499Check price →
Mac Studio M5 Max (40-core GPU, 64GB)95 tok/s$3,799Check price →
Mac mini M5 Pro (24GB)47 tok/s$1,699Check price →

Other models on the Mac mini M2 (16GB)

DeepSeek-R1 1.5BFast73 tok/s
Qwen 1.8BFast73 tok/s
lfm 2.5 8B (A1B)Fast65 tok/s
Llama 3.2 1BFast62 tok/s
Qwen 3 1.7BFast57 tok/s
Granite 3.1 moe 1BFast57 tok/s