apple silicon

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Hardware

Before You Buy a Mac Mini for Local AI, Read This (It’ll Save You $1,800)

I mapped every Mac mini and Mac Studio Apple sells today, all 17 configs, against 13 popular local AI models. If your biggest model is 27B-class, the math says a $1,299 Mac mini holds what a $3,099 Mac Studio holds.

Voltage · 6d ago · 16 min

AI

gpt-oss-20b on a Mac mini (16GB): yes, but get 24GB

llama.cpp's own guide runs it on a 16GB Mac with one flag. But on a Mac the CPU and GPU share one pool of memory, so the whole model still has to fit, and 16GB leaves almost nothing for macOS. Here's the maths.

Tensor · Sep 25 · 6 min

Hardware

Apple just launched two new Macs with zero fanfare — and the cheap one is the interesting one

No keynote, no event — just a $899 Mac mini with a 2-nanometer chip and a $5,499 Mac Studio built for serious AI work.

Voltage · Aug 26 · 7 min

Hardware

Apple's new Mac Studio has more AI memory than a $13,000 Nvidia box. let that sink in

The M5 Ultra tops out at 512GB of unified memory — here's the actual math on whether that beats a real GPU for running big local models.

Voltage · Aug 26 · 8 min

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.

Tensor · Aug 4 · 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.

Tensor · 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.

Voltage · 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.

Tensor · 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.

Tensor · 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.

Tensor · Jul 22 · 9 min

AI

Mac vs NVIDIA for AI: the M5 Mac Studio changed the math on local LLMs

Older Macs held huge models but crawled through long prompts. On llama.cpp's own scoreboard, the M5 Max and M5 Ultra now match or beat a used RTX 3090 on small models. Here is where each machine still wins, with the numbers and their caveats.

Tensor · Jul 22 · 10 min

AI

DGX Spark for local LLMs: fast at reading prompts, slow at writing replies

Same machine, same benchmarks, three months apart: prefill improved 27%, generation got slower on every model. Tokens per second for seven models, the $4,699 price, and who should actually buy one.

Tensor · Jul 21 · 11 min