Outlier Plus on Mac Studio M1 Ultra: runs at the 64 GB minimum by streaming experts from the SSD, with no spare memory on the base model. Minimum unified memory required: 64 GB. Disk size: 209 GB. Default context window: 32K tokens. Measured throughput on this exact machine: 1.59 tok/s (M1 Ultra 64 GB, MLX 4-bit, the K=20 sweep of 2026-05-01: 5 prompts of 80 tokens, fresh process).
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The pairing under examination is Outlier Plus (209 GB MLX 4-bit, Qwen3.5-397B-A17B base, 32K default context, 64 GB unified memory minimum) on a Mac Studio M1 Ultra (Apple M1 Ultra, 20 CPU cores, 48-64 GPU cores, 64 or 128 GB unified memory, 800 GB/s, 2022). Outlier loads this tier through its paged-expert engine inside the bundled FastAPI sidecar. Plus decodes by streaming experts from the SSD, so its speed is set by SSD reads and not by this Mac’s 800 GB/s memory bus.
The Mac Studio M1 Ultra is a desktop with active cooling, which is the configuration that comes closest to holding the figure above through a long unattended run. There is no battery to trade against and no lap to keep cool, so the limit on Outlier Plus here is SSD read speed rather than the thermal envelope. This is the shape of machine to pick if the job runs unattended.
The tier catalog lists a peak generation footprint of about 14.04 GB for Outlier Plus, for a short chat; a long agent session needs more. The rule of thumb is to leave roughly 4 GB for the OS and one open browser tab, so across the Mac Studio M1 Ultra memory options that leaves 64 GB → 46.0 GB free; 128 GB → 110.0 GB free. Measured throughput on this exact machine: 1.59 tok/s (M1 Ultra 64 GB, MLX 4-bit, the K=20 sweep of 2026-05-01: 5 prompts of 80 tokens, fresh process).
The 2022 Mac Studio M1 Ultra ships with 64 or 128 GB of unified memory. Headroom over the 64 GB Outlier Plus minimum is 0 GB on the 64 GB base model. Step-by-step install instructions live on the install guide; the part that varies for this Apple M1 Ultra machine is that the 209 GB pull from mlx-community/Qwen3.5-397B-A17B-4bit over HTTPS lands in ~/Library/Application Support/Outlier/models/plus/ and download time is bandwidth-limited by the network, not by the 20-core Apple M1 Ultra CPU.
The Outlier Plus tier defaults to 32K context and caps at 128K on Pro. KV cache scales linearly with context length on dense models, so longer contexts trade headroom for capacity. On a 64 GB Mac Studio M1 Ultra, the default context is the safe starting point.
209 GB on disk against the 64 GB Mac Studio M1 Ultra (the smallest configuration that meets the 64 GB minimum) means the weights are about 3.3× its memory, which is why Outlier Plus streams from the SSD instead of holding everything in memory.
For lighter-weight work on this Apple M1 Ultra, the Core tier is the next step down and runs visibly faster. The unified-memory explainer works out why this tier streams from the SSD.
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Refund window: 30 days, no questions asked.
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