**Every AI release claims to be “efficient now.” Most of the time, that translates to: still needs expensive hardware still feels slow locally still breaks on reasoning tasks So when Google released Gemma 4 E2B, I honestly assumed it would be another lightweight model that looked good in benchmarks and failed in real usage. I tested it anyway. And after a week of running it locally, I think small models just crossed an important line. My Setup Nothing fancy. ollama run gemma4:2b Hardware: MacBook Air M1 8GB RAM Ollama No external GPU Performance I saw: ~40 tokens/sec average First pull took around 3 minutes RAM usage stayed around 5GB Fan noise was surprisingly manageable Most importantly: it actually felt responsive enough to use continuously. That’s rare for local models on weak hardware. The Moment That Changed My Opinion I tested a simple logic puzzle first. The kind of question smaller models usually fail because they rush into an answer. Without reasoning enabled: wrong answer instantly.…