Mac mini

If we want a full picture: Mac Mini reserves some RAM for the system so you should probably get 24gb versions at least. Best would be some 96gb or higher Mac Studio or smth like that. The higher M CPUs are worth it for local AI. The Tokens per Second they can produce are much better with Pro, Ultra

Return the 24GB Mac Mini M4 Pro. Keeping a brand-new machine that you already plan to replace in a few months is a waste of money, especially since you can easily return it within Apple's 14-day window. If you are currently burning through Claude and ChatGPT, switching 100% to local LLMs right now w

No, don't buy an M1 of any variant in 2026 with the intention of using it for Logic Pro and Final Cut Pro for 5+ years. I normally reckon on getting 3-5 years use out of a Mac (from new) for the kind of work you are describing. You might be lucky and get a couple more years but I wouldn't bank on it

8gb RAM Is definitely a no-go for 2026, it'll struggle even with light use. Other than that, it's still a bit pricey for an M1. It's probably worth it to save up a little more to get a used M4, or if you're not set on MacOS you can probably just get another mini PC at that price and put something li

Got real numbers now instead of guessing. On timing: ran two separate full-library tests on my dev machine (MacBook Pro M4 Pro, 24GB) — 551 images in 1:58:38, and a second overnight run of 500 images in 1:46:00. Both land at almost exactly the same rate, about 12.8 seconds per image, so that's a sol

Well this isn't my specialist area. But I guess I'd suggest a few things and other people will be able to help. Firstly: Ask yourself can you afford to lose all of your data? If the answer is: No, then you need a proper backup strategy, including proper offsite - other people have talked about 3-2-1

I've played on a Mac Studio M2 and it's been decent. I've also played on a Mac Mini M4 and it's... good enough. Multiplayer works fine through Crossfire, but the performance is naturally significantly worse than a similarly priced Windows machine.

I agree that local models can help with privacy no doubt, but: Running AI locally is not as easy as it sounds, you would need a machine that can run an llm model Accuracy levels, you would start seeing better tool calling results when you start with an 8b model (which itself require 16gb mini ram it

I did undergrad and grad school doing CS/EECS with Windows just fine. WSL2 is plenty good. If anything what with only M-series chips being a thing on Macs I would go for a Windows device with a dGPU; my M4 Mac Mini is great at running CPU-heavy workloads but the moment images are thrown into the mix

Wow this is impressive. I tried a larger cosplay heavy rifle thats about 46" long and it works. I'm using Chrome browser on mac mini Apple M2 Pro with 32gb memory but its slow when moving the model, cut planes, etc. I tried a 6 foot tall soldier and it slows down a bit more. Any tips on how to get b