Mac Mini M4 hits 16GB RAM wall

The 16GB entry-level unified memory is no longer sufficient for high-context local development without major architectural compromises. A 128k context with 16-bit KV cache consumes roughly 16GB alone, making 4-bit KV cache quantization (Q4_1) a mandatory requirement for multitasking. Large models like Gemma 4 (26B) and Qwen 3.5 (27B) trigger aggressive disk swapping once the context window fills, leading to a performance cliff regardless of the M4's raw compute. Smaller variants like Qwen 3.5-9B or Gemma 4 E4B provide a superior experience for long-context logs and codebases on base-tier hardware by staying within the unified memory ceiling. High-context retrieval on Apple Silicon is increasingly dependent on specialized architectures like Gated DeltaNet or MoE to balance intelligence with memory constraints.