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8 articles · newest first

AI

apple quietly cut its priciest Mac's RAM by 81% — and it might still be the smarter local-AI buy

Apple's own memory shortage just raised Mac Studio prices and gutted its top RAM tier — here's whether it's still worth buying over a GPU PC for running models at home.

Lena Fischer · 6d ago · 8 min

AI

someone measured the real electricity cost of running AI at home. it's almost nothing

A developer wall-calibrated an Apple Silicon power meter against a smart plug and found the real number: fractions of a cent per million tokens.

Lena Fischer · Aug 3 · 6 min

Hardware

apple's mac studio just beat nvidia's own local-AI chip — and the win doesn't add up

Tom's Hardware ran the numbers on three very different local-AI machines, and the Mac won on raw speed almost across the board — just not by the margin its spec sheet promised.

Ravi Malhotra · Aug 2 · 6 min

AI

the best laptop for running local AI in 2026 is a MacBook — and it's not close, for one reason

Gaming laptops have fast GPUs, but they cap out at 16GB of VRAM. A MacBook Pro's unified memory goes to 128GB. For running AI models on the go, memory wins.

Lena Fischer · Jul 30 · 9 min

AI

Mac Mini M4 or M4 Pro for local AI? the answer comes down to one number you set at checkout

Both run local models silently and efficiently, but the gap between them for AI isn't the chip — it's the memory bandwidth and how much you can buy. Here's which Mac Mini to get.

Lena Fischer · Jul 28 · 9 min

AI

the $1,999 Mac mini runs a 30B model in near silence on 40 watts. here's the catch nobody puts in the headline

A palm-sized box that sips power and runs mid-size local models is a genuinely great story — until you ask it to process a long prompt. What the M4 Pro Mac mini is brilliant at, and the one thing it's quietly bad at.

Lena Fischer · Jul 22 · 9 min

AI

A $1,000 used GPU ties the $9,499 Mac Studio at the benchmark everyone runs

On small-model generation they're within 5% of each other — measured. The real decision lives in what each machine physically can't do, and nobody selling either will tell you.

Lena Fischer · Jul 22 · 10 min

AI

NVIDIA spent three months optimising the DGX Spark. Token generation got slower.

Same machine, same benchmarks, three months apart. Prefill improved 27%. Generation regressed on every model — and that tells you exactly who should buy one.

Lena Fischer · Jul 21 · 10 min