Outlier Nano on MacBook Air 13 M4: fits comfortably. Minimum unified memory required: 6 GB. Disk size: 2.37 GB. Default context window: 32K tokens. Operator-reported throughput: ~32 tok/s on a 16 GB M4 Air (2026-05-04, single-prompt observation, not yet σ-qualified — treat as indicative).
The pairing under examination is Outlier Nano (2.37 GB MLX 4-bit, Qwen3.5-4B base, 32K default context, 6 GB unified memory minimum) on a MacBook Air 13 M4 (Apple M4, 10 CPU cores, 8-10 GPU cores, 16|24|32 GB unified memory, 120 GB/s, 2025). Outlier loads this tier as one mlx_lm process inside the bundled FastAPI sidecar. Apple Silicon decode on dense 4-bit weights is bandwidth-bound, so the ceiling on this exact MacBook Air 13 M4 scales as the ratio 120 / 800 = 0.15× the published M1 Ultra number.
The MacBook Air 13 M4 is fanless. The figure above is a burst ceiling, and burst is not what a sustained back-and-forth session asks for: decoding Outlier Nano keeps the GPU busy continuously, the chassis is the only heatsink, and the SoC down-clocks once it saturates. Expect the first minutes to look like the number above and a long job to settle below it. On battery it settles lower again. Direction verified, magnitude not measured on this machine — we publish the mechanism rather than a throttle figure we have not reproduced.
Outlier’s Outlier Nano has a measured peak generation footprint of about 3 GB. The rule of thumb is to leave roughly 4 GB for the OS and one open browser tab, so across the MacBook Air 13 M4 memory options that leaves 16 GB → 9.0 GB free; 24 GB → 17.0 GB free; 32 GB → 25.0 GB free. Operator-reported throughput: ~32 tok/s on a 16 GB M4 Air (2026-05-04, single-prompt observation, not yet σ-qualified — treat as indicative).
The 2025 MacBook Air 13 M4 ships with 16|24|32 GB of unified memory, so headroom for the 6 GB Outlier Nano requirement is 10 GB on the base SKU. Step-by-step install instructions live on the install guide; the part that varies for this Apple M4 machine is that the 2.37 GB pull from Outlier-Ai/Outlier-Nano-4B-MLX-4bit over HTTPS lands in ~/Library/Application Support/Outlier/models/nano/ and download time is bandwidth-limited by the network, not by the 10-core Apple M4 CPU.
The Outlier Nano tier defaults to 32K context and caps at 256K. KV cache scales linearly with context length on dense models, so longer contexts trade headroom for capacity. On a 16|24|32 GB MacBook Air 13 M4, the default context is the safe starting point.
2.37 GB on disk against 16|24|32 GB unified memory means the weights alone consume about 15% of the base SKU’s RAM on the MacBook Air 13 M4.
For heavier work, the Lite tier is the next step up; check that the 16|24|32 GB SKU you have can fit its weights before installing. The unified-memory explainer works the bandwidth math out, and the bandwidth ratio for MacBook Air 13 M4 is 0.15× M1 Ultra reference.
Download Outlier for MacRequires Apple Silicon (M1, M2, M3, or M4) — Intel Macs are not supported. macOS 12+.
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