Apple M2 Pro

Apple M2 Pro (32GB): the double-memory configuration of Apple's second-generation Pro chip, launched January 2023 as a build-to-order upgrade on the 14-inch and 16-inch MacBook Pro and, later that year, the Mac mini. Same 200 GB/s LPDDR5 bandwidth and 12-core CPU (8P+4E) as the 16GB sibling — only the memory pool triples the sibling's usable headroom. Worth naming: M2 Pro's 200 GB/s was never beaten by its immediate successor. The M3 Pro that replaced it a year later actually cut bandwidth to 150 GB/s, and it took until the M4 Pro (273 GB/s) for Apple's Pro tier to move past what this chip already had in 2023.

24 GB of real headroom after the standard 8 GB reservation lets this site's calculator fit Qwen3 32B natively at Q4_K_M (23.9 GB, ~7.5 tok/s) and Mixtral 8x7B at Q2_K (~9.2 tok/s), both out of reach on the 16GB sibling. Mid-size models get precision headroom too: Llama 3.1 8B and Qwen2.5 7B fit at full BF16 instead of Q5/Q6, at roughly 9.4-10.2 tok/s. 46 of the 84 tracked models fit natively, up from 26 on the 16GB sibling — the extra 16 GB unlocks a full tier of 32-35B models, not just more headroom on the same 7-14B models.

Full MLX and llama.cpp Metal support, same as the 16GB sibling. Community llama.cpp benchmarks on 19-core-GPU M2 Pro report roughly 38 tok/s decode on a 7B model at Q4_0 (ggml-org/llama.cpp Discussion #4167), well ahead of the base M2's ~22 tok/s at the same quant — consistent with the 200 vs 100 GB/s bandwidth difference, though real-world gains from doubled bandwidth often fall short of a clean 2x due to compute-side overhead at small batch sizes.

Apple M2 Pro (16GB): the base memory tier of Apple's second-generation Pro chip, standard on the $1,999 14-inch MacBook Pro starting January 2023. The cheapest configuration pairs a binned 10-core CPU (6P+4E) with a 16-core GPU; every other M2 Pro machine — the 16-inch MacBook Pro, the Mac mini, and the 32GB configuration tracked separately on this site (m2-pro-32) — gets the full 12-core CPU (8P+4E) and 19-core GPU. Both binnings share the identical 200 GB/s LPDDR5 bandwidth.

This site's calculator reserves 8 GB of the 16 GB pool for macOS and background apps — leaving 8 GB of real headroom, a third of the 32GB sibling's 24 GB from the identical reservation. That caps sensible model choices around 7-9B parameters at real quality: Llama 3.1 8B fits at Q5_K_M (7.58 GB, ~23.6 tok/s) and Qwen2.5 7B fits at Q6_K (7.51 GB, ~23.8 tok/s) — both roughly double the identical-capacity base M2 16GB's speed, since 200 GB/s is twice the base M2's 100 GB/s. Reach for 12-14B models and the pool only has room at the bottom of the quant ladder: Qwen3 14B needs Q2_K (7.82 GB). 26 of the 84 tracked models fit natively.

macOS's default Metal working-set limit (roughly 75% of unified memory) is about 12 GB on this configuration. Community guides for raising it with `sudo sysctl iogpu.wired_limit_mb=...` generally recommend leaving 8-16 GB in reserve for macOS itself — on a 16 GB machine that reserve is most of the pool, so there's little safe room to push past what this page already assumes.