Run Ollama Locally on Mac: Complete Setup Guide for Apple Silicon (2026)

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🩺 Summary

Mac Apple Silicon is excellent for local LLMs due to unified memory. Install Ollama with one command.

📝 Details

Apple Silicon unified memory = GPU access to all RAM. A 64GB Mac runs 34B models needing K+ PC. Install: curl -fsSL https://ollama.com/install.sh | sh. Then: ollama pull llama3.1:8b. 16GB Mac runs 7B at 30-50 tok/s. 64GB Mac runs 70B at 5-12 tok/s.

FAQ

GPU? Yes via Metal API. Battery? 7B chat drains ~15-20%/hour on MacBook Air.