Apple's new Mac minis are primed for local AI. I specced one for 2,899

When you purchase through links in our articles, we may earn a small commission. Apple's new Mac minis are primed for local AI. Apple's new M6 and M5 Pro Mac minis promise big local AI gains, but RAM limits and no CUDA support come with real trade-offs. The Mac mini became the surprise local AI hero earlier this year, packing a relatively large pool of RAM into a small, always-on, reasonably affordable form factor that was catnip for OpenClaw AI users. Since then, both AMD and Nvidia have teed up their own AI-centric Mac mini rivals, with AMD's Ryzen AI Halo and Nvidia's RTX Spark-powered systems serving up beefy processors and gobs of unified memory.