MacBook Air 15-inch M5 16GB

Apple’s fanless ultraportable, 2026 generation on the M5: 13-inch from $1,199 and 15-inch from $1,399, 16GB or 24GB unified memory, 153 GB/s bandwidth, 20W chip. The 24GB option is the one to pick for local models - 16GB leaves too little room above the OS and KV cache for anything beyond 7-8B dense at 4-bit.

What it does well:

• Silence: no fan at all, so inference is inaudible.
• Portability at 24GB: 30B-class MoE models (Qwen-class at 3-bit) run on a 1.2kg laptop.

Where it falls short: no active cooling means sustained generation throttles earlier than a Pro; 153 GB/s is the slowest Apple silicon tier on this site, and tok/s on large models reflects that.

Run it locally: Ollama or LM Studio. The modeldex results show what fits and its estimated tok/s.