There is a very small box sitting on Apple’s website right now that I think a lot of AI users are going to misunderstand.
It starts at $899. It looks like an ordinary Mac mini. But with the new M6 chip, it can now keep surprisingly capable AI models, your files, and even parts of your AI workflow running directly on your desk.
No distant data centre for every small task. No token meter running every time you ask something simple.
That matters because local models have quietly become much better. Qwen3.8-27B is around 18GB, Qwen3-Coder 30B around 19GB, Gemma 4 12B around 7.6GB, and OpenAI’s gpt-oss-20B around 14GB.
The new M6 Mac mini can go up to 32GB of unified memory.
Suddenly, “running your own AI” does not sound like a lab experiment anymore.
But there is one catch: I would not buy the $899 model for it.